Re: Shades of TV detector vans ?
The B-21 shouldn't have any of the maintenance issues the B2 did. It's using a new RAM that hasn't been announced but is generally believed to be ceramic based and a whole lot tougher (the ceramic RAM project, which is publicly known, has requirements for space operation and reentry even). Ongoing cost is part of cheaper.
The B2, aside from bad completion timing wet cold war, had the issue that it was too expensive to build enough to amortize R&D costs. This means it never hit its cost criteria and ended up running well over 2 billion current dollars a piece. Then there's the high maintenance costs, the insane shelters that need to be built for it (B-21 is happy to sit mostly wherever), additional training load, etc.
Generally speaking the R&D cost will be spread over every unit when calculating the cost. That's the main driver behind each round of F35s getting cheaper than the last as new countries come in.
I'd guess the AF is happy having F35s instead of Raptors at this point btw. The F35 is getting better with each update and the Raptor's software side is a fucking disaster nobody wants to put new capabilities into because some DoD bot insisted on Ada. F35 uses C like a total Chad.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
