The justification of these cost estimates is the intriguing thing. I cannot find an engineering explanation for these "conversion costs". To do PoW, the following activities would be necessary.
1. Acquire the hardware for EMALS and AAG. From open sources based on US costs this is unlikley to exceed £450M for a ship set.
2. Integrate the hardware physically into PoW. This will require five activities :
a) Undertake the engineering calculations and design to reconfigure the 2 deck spaces where the cats are supposed to go. This would be a design team of say 30 people for a couple of years at absolute worst, so around £12M.
b) Modify the structure to accept the EMALS and AAR systems. As most of the structure for POW has not yet been fabricated, this should not be particularly difficult. In materials terms, you're looking at some small tens of tons of steel (say 40 te @ £2000/te), so that's in the noise. In manpower terms, the work content is probably 2000m joint length of weld, which at 8 manhours per metre is 16000 manhours, which at very worst would be about £1M.
c) Modify the Integrated Platform Mgmt System (IPMS) to allow charging of the energy storage devices adjacent to each EMALS from the main 11 kVA power dist grid and also to accept power input from the AAG. The IPMS is an L3 product and involves software (which is never good). However, I'd still suggest you could fix it for £50M at very worst. Anything beyond that indicates that you'd run out of bodies to write it.
d. Install the actual EMALS/AAG hardware. If you had a gang of 30 blokes (alright sparkies) spending ten weeks to install one system, then you're looking at 12000 manhours. Even though AAG is supposed to be a bit simpler, assume all six devices (2 cats, 4 wires) take the same. That's 70000+ sparkies hours which at the very extreme is about £7M (pink ovies don't come cheap!)
e. Set to work and commission. If you assumed 20 people for a year, you'd probably be at the top end and that's 40000 manhours or ~ £4M (worst case).
So, about £450M hardware, £75M direct labour and there might be another £100M in terms of design support, documentation, logistics etc as shown in the US contracts.
I make that just over £600M, but then I'm just a simple metal-basher.
This looks more and more like a whole raft of "other costs" being tagged onto the "conversion" to make it look unaffordable.
Last edited by Not_a_boffin; 19th Mar 2012 at 13:51.