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Figures courtesy of Congressional Budget Office assuming 3% inflation rate
Lead Ship Cost Estimate
In order to estimate the cost of procuring the lead ship in the Sea TENTACLE class, our team began with a basic construction cost of $600 million dollars.  This figure is what the Congressional Budget Office has determined that it would cost to procure a FFG-7 in today’s dollars and it is the same figure that it used to start its cost estimation for the FFG(X).  Next, we added $200 million for detailed design costs associated with a platform of this complexity.  To this, $250 million is added in order to upgrade existing shipbuilding facilities to support catamaran construction of this size.  This infrastructure upgrade cost is included in estimating the procurement cost for the first two ships in the class but can be eliminated in follow-on ships.  Finally, using the same cost per unit that was used by the CBO for VLS cell procurement and added displacement, $1 million per VLS cell and $400 million for the 3,000 tons more displacement over the FFG-7 are added to the estimate.  This brings the total for the first copy of the Sea TENTACLE to around $1.5 billion with the second at $1.3 billion and an average over 10 ships of $900 million per ship.