"The French claim (and please go ahead and disprove it) that they expect 294 Rafales to cost about as much as Germany's share of Typhoon."
LO
It might be true but it is also meaningless, as the reverse could be true, the x billion euros spent on Rafale development could have bought n hundred Typhooons for Germany. A good bit of spin but you are comparing apples and oranges.
Typically a project is costed in 2 chunks, non-recurring and recurring. Non-recurring hoovers up all the development and certification costs and as the name suggests is a single spend. The recurring element is how much it subsequently costs to build the fleet and can be broken down into total or unit cost.
A more meaningfull comparison would be to add each individual countries recurriing and non-recurring cost and divide that by the number of airframes. It is possible that with a bigger buy the UK cost per airframe could be more or less than other member nations in Typhoon alone.
Beware the beancounters.
regards
retard