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Cost of an Ancient Warship
"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. |
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