$100 is a cost of a 60mm mortar shell. It is a hand grenade sized munition lobbed from a Pringles can sized weapon to the range of 1-2km. This is generally not the thing that comes to mind when you think of artillery strike.
A 155mm (dumb, unguided) shell would set you back 5-8K USD. That's before the propellant charge, fuse and amortization of the artillery piece and its 5 man crew.
A M107 155mm round weights 95lbs when launched. Assuming that is pure lead (this is false, but lead is very cheap and it gives us numbers to work with) I can buy lead ignots for $2.89/lbs. Which puts us at $293 per rounds in just materials. Since we assume the other materials cost money too, plus there is the energy used to turn ignots into a round, it seems unlikely you can get the cost to much under $1000 no matter how good your mass production is.
But theoretically much better aimed. Don’t know if there’s enough data here to do the math. Plus that it’s a bit gauche to do math about human lives, but here we are.
Do you have numbers for that? Because the higher-end munition also has (rudimentary) steering capabilities? And higher end stuff obviously has the same or better honing software
That's interesting thankyou. It's a good google rabbit hole. Apparently we're in surge pricing right now because of Ukraine, and Russian shells are only costing them $1000. It seems they caught us sleeping, manufacturing wise.
The heavy Soivet calibre used by Russia is 152mm which translates to a slightly cheaper shell (though not 5x for sure). Russia also uses 122mm arty which is substantially cheaper: the costs follow to the cube volume. Another factor is that a lot of supplies are Iranian and North Korean old stock with what we can assume reasonable prices. Ukraine was getting Vietnam war era 155mm stock relatively cheap too, while it lasted.
A 155mm (dumb, unguided) shell would set you back 5-8K USD. That's before the propellant charge, fuse and amortization of the artillery piece and its 5 man crew.