"Charles Talleyrand" wrote in message ...
"Andrew Toppan" wrote in message ...
On Mon, 25 Aug 2003 20:33:51 -0400, "Charles Talleyrand"
wrote:

I'm interested in any time period from ancient Egypt to maybe Napoleon.
I'm just trying to get an order of magnitude informed guess.
Significant Google searching didn't help. Can anyone here help?

10 seconds of Googling for HMS VICTORY indicates that she "cost £63,176. For
comparison, this would be equivalent to the cost of building an aircraft
carrier today."

http://www.hms-victory.com/factsandfigures.htm



And the USS Constitution cost $302,718 in 1797 US dollars,
although the Brits could build a 74 gun ship for less.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/s...nstitution.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Al...43/supfrig.htm


I'm trying to understand these numbers in terms of something like
manhours needed to build the ship. I note that the pay for a US
sailor was 10-17 US$ per month. Therefore it took something
like 25,000 man-months to build a Constitution (or a British 74).
Does this seem reasonable?

If you're curious, the Constition was 3x over budget in part due to
political problems with Congressional funding, and is therefore a bad
example to use. That's why I'm asking for other examples. And please
don't pull this thread into a 'Congress has always sucked' direction. Can
we please have one thread without current politics?

Can someone offer other examples, particularly from a different
time period and/or a different sized ship? That would be
most helpful.



J. Richard Steffy, Wooden Shipbuilding and the Interpetation of
Shipwrecks, Texas A&M University Press, 1994.