SSSETOWTF & Capt P
I have built ships gents. Let me tell you that Illustrious herself took 21M manhours all in. A T23 Frigate could be had for under 2M manhours.
If I apply a slightly more sensible rate of £50/hour, that £1Bn plus unaccounted for becomes 20M manhours.
The hardware price available open source includes a lot of engineering support, publications etc in the "£500M".
Other than the hardware, there are minor material costs (<<500 te of steel, which is currently @£2000/te - £1m the lot). Cabling? OK - tens mil if we're unlucky. Anything else apart from the power mgmt integration (the entire system was less than £100M) is manpower. Whichever way you slice it, well over 12 million manhours (that's 6000 people for a full year) doesn't smell right. Particularly when so many of the team "overheads" project mgmt, finance etc exist already.
My personal estimate would be something like a DO team of 50 for a year (that's 100000 manhours), 250000 extra steel hours, 400000 extra sparkies hours and a few odds and sods. Tell you what, call it a million manhours - at £100/hr (!) that's £100M. Plus your £500M hardware and say £100M for the power mgmt integration (a million manhours of software coders), plus the odds and sods. Add that up and you get £700M and a bit. If this is supposed to be conversion cost only, then you can hopefully see why I'm sceptical of the £1.8bn figure.
DLODs are all well and good, but this is supposed to be early years conversion costs, not TLC. If it is to include DLOD, then presumably less F35C compared to B might have an impact?