.............and of course if we build it ourselves the capital cost (and associated risk) has to be included in the price and borne initially by the manufacturer. In theory the CAPEX is recouped in the unit cost of production and in later batches once this is paid off the profit margin increases.
But in the UK we don't like spending money up front nowadays and therefore don't really do high volume manufacturing on these sort of things by ourselves any more. Hence the various consortiums to spread the cost and the risks around a bit............
Also UK only orders will not underpin this type of model. If you took the P8 for example we are capable of building this mission platform from scratch. Or modifying an Airbus platform to complete the role. But an order of 8 or 12 airframes and development of various systems and modifications means it's just not going to be viable. So we pay a fair chunk more and buy an off-the-shelf option............reduce the risk and accept that the supplier is recovering his CAPEX from us (or taking the profit associated with a mature product)
Our Victorian forefathers who ran the industrial revolution would laugh at our incompetence with regard to production runs and CAPEX versus risk profile analysis. And lucky for us they never thought this way or we'd have no railways, sewers, roads, canals or anything else for that matter...........
A-VAN - I too have often wondered why the RAF has never brought Gripen - even if it was just for use in the UKADR/QRA scenario where we are really interested in numbers more than just technology to achieve the intercept..........
Arc