If I recall in one of the halo books, I think fall of reach actually. That the power supply for Mjolnir being the micro fusion pack is what a little over half the cost of Mjolnir goes to. I remember them saying at one point Mjolnir cost as much as a battle ship or a frigate or something like that in the earlier stages of the war, i'm sure the price has come down since then though.
We are looking at tens to hundreds of millions at the low end for a single suit. Think USN Cruisers or Destroyers in cost. Thats excluding R&D costs. So the whole program is in the Billions easily and probably $500M per suit easily for the S2's.
Yeah, i do believe that was in The Fall of Reach: they compared it with the cost of a destroyer. (Bit bigger than the Forward Unto Dawn, smaller than a cruiser like the Pillar of Autumn) But i can not remember if they were talking about Mark IV or Mark V. To compare that with a modern day destroyer: A new US Navy Arleigh Burke class destroyer costs around 1.4 billion dollars.
I think there's a similar comparison in Ghosts of Oynx, when they're justifying the armor downgrade for the Spartan III's. I want to say the cost of a Mjolnir suit was comparable to a Destroyer, so a smaller warship but still a warship.
I've been wondering since I heard a single suit costs as much as a destroyer. I guess it's similar to how an ultra high precision mechanical watch can cost as much as an expensive car.
That was stated before the Spartan project on the way to John 117 and the other recruits Needless to say that was a speculative cost based on the Spartan 1 scale project and included research and adjustment. They scaled that down most likely and well ‘hey those Spartans cost 100x what you said, what was all that research for if it could only be used on your selected few and we couldn’t pick any’ So yeah, the dislike of that stuff and the experimental shield tech probably made people annoyed. Imagine if they got the Spartan 1 project running and it worked. The Spartan 3 project can be seen as justified in comparison and makes sense given ‘Halsey selected her candidates now we’ll select ours’ For obvious reasons we somehow couldn’t have similar results with the Spartans 2s. Personally I would prefer if we had Spartan 2s. Then different branches of said series. Such as Locke not being a Spartan four but something specific to ONI. Then expand it to ODSTs. I would then just expand the Spartan 3 project idea and have Spartan 2’s selected to train the next gen Spartans and go from there. Then you get the issue of how much ‘humanity’ there is if your body is being augmented. You could have people try and integrate Promethean tech into themselves or Index themselves to become Prometheans themselves under their own AI constructs and so on. Possibly having Monitors adapt them into their own security systems and augmenting them like in ‘hunter in the dark’ and so on. It could expand to possibly making the flood a possible research candidate and so on. I would then argue Indies and possible anti alteration humanity… because hey if super humans are working on this why wouldn’t they make it so only super humans could run this equipment later with how advance it can get… and where would that leave the select few? Remember the Spartan project was and still is intended for Inies, regular humans. All the aliens did was give them a more popular target.
Whats even more insane, is that new version of the fusion pack, uses reverse engineered Covenant ship tech, where two points fire a laser to the material in the middle, creating a stable 'sun', creating leaps and bounds more energy than the old packs. This directly relates to why the Chief can arm tank Atrioxs hammer, with his shields still in tact like its nothing... The cost of Mjlnor must be in thr billions
@@GiRR007 I know but I'm trying to know if RebelOfTheNorm meant as in the Fusion Pack of the Gen 3 is creating a energy akin to the sun inside the the fusion pack of the Gen 3, I know the Gen 1 Mark VII have a fusion pack that mixes the human engineered and reverse covenant engineered fusion reactor and some materials to create an environment for a star to form in inside the fusion pack, meaning it has tons of energy than the previous Mjolnir's and I'm wondering if the fusion pack of Mjolnir Gen 3 is more improved or advanced than Gen 1 Mark VII
The armorer is one of the best characters, even though we see him for such a short time. Imagine, calling the Chief "Son" like he's just another Jarhead out of boot. I like to think Chief appreciated his candor.
@@DetectiveLance The three people that will always out rank you no matter what are the _running demolitionist,_ the cook, and the quartermaster. Now which of these outranks the other is up for questioning, but my money is on the demo until they stop running, _then_ it's the quartermaster.
That was an interesting idea towards the end of the video, the idea of a decommissioned MJOLNIR suit being put on display in a museum with all of its vital components stripped out, leaving only the undersuit and armor plating intact.
Well since Mister Chief one of the AI's on infinite praises you he says something about "and that's why you cost 2 frigates" or something like that, even if we can't estimate how much credits are worth, it is insane how one single super soldier is worth that much
Considering what Spartans are capable of, I think they are well worth the price, best tax credits ever spent, just ask the rest of humanity after the Spartans (primarily Chief and Noble Team in game) saved humanity from extinction. If that isn't a good investment of resources, I don't know what is. The insane part is that while the Covenant is more advanced tech and ship wise, the UNSC's Spartans are far more advanced and lethal than nearly anything the Covenant ever fielded on the ground (always had to outnumber and outgun Spartans to beat them similar to how UNSC had to do the same to beat Covenant ships with their own.)
@@erasablefallen7223 Halsey says in the Fall of Reach that a single Spartan is worth more (not necessarily monetarily) than a fleet of destroyers. So yeah I agree with your comment wholeheartedly
That still seems extremely low. Maybe for Gen2 suits. But Gen1 were stated to cost the same as a UNSC ship. A modern day Arleigh Burke class destroyer is $1.8 billion. That honestly sounds alot more realistic for Gen1 suits. And I'd bet Gen3 is probably similar, if not a bit lower since I'm sure they incorporated some of what they learned with Gen2 into 3.
It's been stated that the Knitted-crystal computer memory layer supposedly represents 80% of the cost of the suit. With this, his 125million estimate, reactive systems, and polymerized lithium niobecene brings the cost easily to the billions.
Before I even watched the video, this is actually gone over briefly in the LOR. The general expense for armor like master chief, was about the cost of one of the UNSC most expensive carriers or up to a similar cost of an entire UNSC battle group. It just depends on which Spartan armor you are referring to, and when the Spartan program officially started. For example, Spartan 2 Armor versus SPI armor.
One of the things to consider when looking at military equipment acquisition costs is what the R&D costs are. The cost of each piece of Mjolnir would also include the total R&D costs (physical prototypes included) divided by the number of serialized/combat ready units produced. For Gen1 Mk. IV Mjolnir, the R&D would have been astronomically high, likely comparable to a current 5th gen fighter or bomber R&D program. Of the original 300 Spartans the training program was budgeted for, only 75 were selected, and of those just over 30 would ever be put in the field, the total average cost of R&D per suit ended up being almost 10x higher. So the R&D cost burden was very likely in the high 10s of millions of dollars, or even a bit over $100million per Gen1 Mk. IV unit. This is largely why NASA's space suites are so expensive. They have a high R&D cost spread out over a very limited number of suits
I think the closest thing we have to micro nuclear fusion power plants would be focus fusion. The process of nuclear fusion using the inherent instabilities within magnetic filaments to condense gasses into a plasmoid. This process is being worked on by a physicist, Eric Learner. It has the potential to be directly converted into electrical energy without going through a steam cycle. Even the potential device he's building and the other models of the device he's built are about the size of a refrigerator or small car like a Volkswagen beetle. So not really backpack size, however, give it a few centuries, it might get smaller.
A video on if it's possible to create the flood (as close as we can get with our science at least, we don't have neural physics obviously) would be super interesting installation00.
Didn't someone in-universe say there was a "ship-to-mjolnir" conversation rate of some kind? Would it be easier to figure out the price of a ship and deduce that way?
Incredibly fascinating breakdown on a nearly impossible subject. The reality is we may never actually know for sure how much as there are so many variables we just can't account for. Great job regardless.
The most expensive part are how the on board electronics , circuitry and it's required durability to take a gangbang level of constant beatings. How they miniaturize such components and it's capabilities to be used in very long deployments. Just like in 40k it's equivalent to an astartes auto-senses or it's scanners and detectors plus it's AI complimentary is what makes it special and be the crunch of it's viable cost.
On top of all that there was also no mention of the energy shielding, something that even to the unsc is a relatively new technology. That can't be cheap either, would guess it would be another category in the unknown price
At worst it'd probably be slightly more expensive than a modern soldier's kit. There's a lot of advancements in electronics and materials that the marines and ODSTs get in their gear, but ultimately its just a suit of normal unpowered armor. ODST armor is vacuum capable and has its own oxygen supply, so its probably worth a couple kits of standard issue marine armor.
This makes the existence of Mirage IIC and Rakshasa cores much more understandable. Even if the UNSC could just augment a bunch of soldiers into Spartan IV’s, the titanium MJOLNIR suits are so expensive that they could only give them to the best of the best Spartan IV’s.
one of the many reason why Power Armor is still an amazing yet costly venture in Sci-fi series, until with find a more effective material or lucrative resources to make mass produce Power Armor we'll be amazed that one in 12 UNSC Soldiers can utilize one and they're not a spartan. I need see that when it happens.
Could you cover the differences between Mjonir's tech suit and Crysis nano suit. I know youve covered both separately. But a comparison would be cool. Things like the nanosuit symbiosis and your theory on how Mjonir reacts to its users movement.
I mean given the in universe stated costs of half a modern warship $125m for just the frame makes sense. A modern warship is around $1 Billion per ship. Given Mjolnir is literally cutting edge and has a whole heap of super classified experimental military tech 1/2 to 3/4 Billion is quite a reasonable estimate.
it is stated in lore that one suit of Mjolnir was equivalent in price to a Halberd Class Destroyer during the Human-Cov war and considering Naval Vessel are more valuable that one spartan bot alot of mjolnir was produced, which why most of the spartan 3's wore that semi-powered armour.
For the printing, I'd say that we could make a ceramic slurry that could be painted on in layers around a plastic 3d print of the desired armor component before having the plastic melt and flow out of the newly fired mold. With this now in place, assuming it's able to remain solid above the melting point of the desired casting material, such as the titanian our dear Irish narrator/researcher here. Once the cast is done, all that's needed is to chip and flake away the mold and trim and file off the sprues, slag, and residue from the mold material that formed in the holes that the casting material was poured into and where the metal and ceramic met during the casting.
7:00 that has got to be the coolest injection molder I have ever seen Step one: dissolved titanium inside water Step two: boil out water, forge titanium *mostly* together Step three: heat up titanium via laser to solidify it, likely keeping it inside “kiln” for a few days to veery slowly cool off Step four: sound reverberating through the foggy air at the end of the process rips off slag.
Fun video! I think there's a different way to approach this question which can, generally, point in the direction of an accurate estimate. Rather than breaking down the components of the armor (or whatever futuristic weapons system), their engineered and materials cost, additive value, etc, instead refer to project costs in terms of capability and use case. I.E. you should evaluate these costs the way the real defense industry and procuring governments do. What's a weapons system package that we today, regularly employ at our frontline, in which an individual soldier is tasked with the operation of a highly-iterated upon, cutting edge piece of hardware that costs exorbitant amounts of money? Fighter aircraft. The training alone of a modern US fighter pilot costs the Department of Defense millions before she or he even sits in the cockpit of a deployed asset. The fighter itself has a cost that is leveraged against a production run of the unit, estimated service life, maintenance costs, and how that cost will decline as the program is stood up. A common phenomenon of this is that the initially produced units will have a wildly higher on-paper cost than the final units, and the longer the service life of the unit (generally speaking) the more this nominal costs (vs the program itself) will drop. This is why a fighter like the F-35 Lightning II has such a high initial unit cost that declines as not only the procurement and upgrade program matures, but as more units are added for the same amount of research and development costs spun out at the start of the project. A convenient way to think of this is, we don't make the decision of what we'll eat based on the individual unit cost of a grain of rice or a single noodle in the bowl, we evaluate the value of the meal itself. Knowing this you can start to develop ideas about "how much, percentage wise, of its economy does the UNSC dedicate to defense spending? What does their economy look like?" You can start to make educated inferences there rather than try to divine the cost of technologies which don't exist yet. Compare like for like, rather than unlike to unlike.
This kind of thing is why I find it incredibly difficult to believe Spartans have anywhere near the amount of customization we are led to believe they have in their base armor. The premise I would think would be that a Spartan has some input at the start of their armor's creation, but they would not be issued new helmets, new shoulders etc. unless it was deemed necessary at that time. Either based on mission requirements, or damaged components needing replacement. And I find it hard to believe so many variations would exist in the first place. Reach was already starting to stretch my believability a bit. But at least the customizations in that game were still parts that could be placed on top of the base suit, as opposed to the suit itself. In H4, the customizations would replace large parts of the entire suit itself. It's hard to call the Wetwork set even Mjolnir, because aside from the undersuit none of it *was* Mjolnir. It introduced dozens of entirely customized entire suits, instead of just parts. And I always felt that jumped of the shark. Infinite thankfully toned it down again, not in terms of parts but in terms of actual sets of armor. We have 4 canon cores, and 2 canon kits that effectively act as their own core as well. But most of them are just updates on previous armor designs *which makes sense* and all of them aside from arguably Rakshasa are actual Mjolnir armor. We can just put stuff on top of it, like H3 and Reach. In terms of scaling the price of Mjolnir. It's been said that it is the second-most expensive piece of technology in human history, behind the slipspace drive. So the development of Mjolnir armor stands somewhere between the cost of building a Slipspace-capable ship, and whatever the third most expensive thing that exists in the Halo universe is. The idea that they could make a few hundred? Yeah I can get behind that. The idea that they can make thousands, or tens of thousands? The UNSC might consider that a worthwhile investment, after all they have developed thousands of ships. But when you take the personalization of that armor into account it starts to be a stretch. Only a small handful of variations of human slipspace-capable ships exist in the Halo universe *because* of how expensive and advanced the technology is. So as I said before, there would definitely be *some* level of customization available, but I think Infinite's little parts here and there on top makes a lot more sense than 4/5's full suits of custom armor components.
I'm pretty sure that when a sparten reaches a certain level of skill they are allowed to file a request to have a custom aromour made for them (when they first graduate as spartans they're given a standardised kit) which is why there's a lot less S4s with custom armour. However when they do get custom armout they get input on what they want from the armout and its abiities, then the Spartan branch armourers take into account their specialisation (Combat mechanic, Medic, sniper, stealth ops, weapons expert...etc) and their skils to put together an armour for them. They only thing spartans have complete control over is the colour of the suit. I belive they are allowed to have minor things added or tweaked (as in things like: armour attachtments, visor colour and coatings..etc) but the bigger things take a while or are simply not allowed outside of replacements for damage.
Page 45 of Ghosts of Onyx, and I quote 'Captain Rich's brows shot up. "I've never seen these figures before... MJOLNIR suit construction, maintenance staff, and recent upgrades to their microfusion plants. Christ! You could build a new battle group for what Halsey is spending."' I'm sure SOMETHING can be extrapolated from that. I think it'd be easier to attempt to find what is in a battle group, break down the potential price for each ship, find the rough cost of a nuclear plant upgrade, the average spending on a military maintenance crew, figure out how many Spartans were active at the time Captain Rich was saying that, and MAYBE come close to an estimate and compare the estimate from this video and compare it to the estimate from what I just said, giving a possible range. Maybe going as far as looking at the average global inflation the the last hundred years and figuring out a possible inflation rate for the next 500 years, conservatively.
And the point is... The navy lost so much materale. Ship to ship was one sided. Pointless. Build more spartan IIs. They were the most effective weapon against the covies.
@@mikemoore2791 I said nothing that would bring this response up. I was just trying to say there is an alternate way to figure out the price of a suit of Mjolnir armor that might be a little more accurate. I said nothing about a ship being a better use of money. Nor did I say anything about a matchup or that Spartans were a bad use of the money. I genuinely don't know why you responded at all. Why did you respond the way you did? Butthurt that someone responded on-topic and you didn't? Frustrated that someone is trying to find the price of a suit of fictional armor that a fictional sector of the fictional military from the fictional future wears? Did you feel attacked? please, make your response make sense.
I wonder if the ghost prototype suit would be more feasible to build a real world analog because of its size minus the flying bit cause ion thrusters just aren't there yet
It’s said that one of the reasons why the prototype suit wasn’t mass produced (aside from loss of blueprints) was because it is stated to be more expensive than Mjolnir.
We could probably build an exoskeleton at that size today, given some focus. The most insurmountable issue currently would be the power source, since we don't have viable fusion reactors even at normal sizes, let alone capable of being miniaturized to the point of installation into something that's roughly the size of a large car/truck. I'm mostly talking out of my ass but I find the whole idea fascinating. Once power is solved, making hydraulics and actuators capable of moving the suit around like you see in the animation probably isn't possible. However I bet we could make something capable of walking/running without falling flat on its butt. Fitting armor and armaments, along with a fire control system to operate them would probably take a LOT of development but ultimately I think that's something we could figure out. In the end though you'd basically be left with a more expensive, less stable, and less efficient tank, since you'd only have one human to move the thing and fire its weapons, whereas tanks have multiple crew members with distinct roles in combat. Still, it would be so goddamn cool to see in real life.
Based on what you say in this video, and since in lore I’m pretty sure I remember it being said that each suit is worth about as much as a UNSC destroyer I would put anything in the realm of the billions to tens of billions of dollars as being reasonable Not to mention that until recently in lore the Spartan program was extremely top-secret, so materials can only be acquired from specialty contractors, and there’s extra overhead on shipping and assembly, just from the sheer nature of it being a secret project Each unit of mjolnir is essentially the equivalent of a United States aircraft carrier, in terms of value to the UNSC, and I’d imagine the price tag would reflect that
It’s definitely mentioned in the Fall of Reach that a suit costs as much as one battleship or another. So not sure what that would equate to in a currency we would understand but definitely billions. I do forget exact details though whether this was including an AI and whatnot.
We actually have examples of metal presses in modern manufacturing. They're *MASSIVE* machines that apply so much pressure to metals that they are formed into the shape of the dye; this is how most high end aircraft parts, and really anything with ridiculously high tolerance requirements, are made. Needless to say, these machines are ludicrously expensive to build, and wouldn't really get to a point of being cheap with Halo's technology. I'd assume, the ones we see, cost in the ballpark of hundreds of millions, or even billions, given their complexity. (In USD)
Hey Installation 00, long time fan here. I just read some science news that makes me happy, I think you’ll like this one! Another piece of the incredibly detailed science fiction Eric Nylund and Joe Staten came up with has been tested IRL. In both Fall of Reach/The Flood/First Strike and Contact Harvest, we learn that long range space comms are hard lol duh and the medium/short range comms system in use by both the UNSC and the Covenant is a laser/maser system. Beaming info on light. This was a natural progression from the (at the time) state of the art tech of fiber optics. It’s a somewhat obvious theory considering light is basically the limit for travel speeds for anything, so to move information at close to the speed of light is dope. But anyways NASA’s Psyche mission has beamed information on a laser for the first time and that is some like straight up Halo shit and I’m happy
The metal work in space is forging not casting and is accomplished by heating up metal (not melting) and pressing it into shape with a mold which results in a much stronger and less brittle product because metal loses its best qualities when melted into a molten state and is very common in high end engine components.
Honestly, based off of everything you’ve said, the Halo lore wanting 300 Spartans but could only get half of the funding for (or so). And the UNSC is something of the equivalent to the UN. Based off of US currency, if those four items were actually somehow real. I’d say they would be astronomically more expensive than the 125m price tag you put. In todays money, I would give a hard guess of one spartan would cost the equivalent of 1-5 trillion dollars a suite. Whatever that would be in credits, 500 years from now. Obviously today, the entire world is only worth maybe up to 100 trillion dollars (give or take). BUT, 500 years from now… hundreds of planets, population at maybe like 50-200 billion humans; obviously the economy will be leagues bigger than today. But even 500 years from now, an economy that huge, whatever the equivalent of 1-5 trillion is; that’s still a fuck ton of money for a few dozen soldiers. That’s my guess lol…
Amourphous metal has amazing properties which would be ideal and cooled extremely quickly with liquid nitrogen immediately after casting and may be the reason it is not glowing after being pressed
Thare is another take here that could be used for a rough estimate of the cost for a fully functional suit. The price has been compared to a warship, so use the cost of a modern navy destroyer, assume a 1:1 currency conversion, factor in 500 years of inflation, and you should have a ballpark estimate.
In traditional manufacturing waste material is almost never "thrown away" like you said in fact most machines are designed to capture as much of the shavings as possible so they can be recycled and melted down and reused again. Especially titanium because you have to keep the workspace around titanium clean of crap anyway might as well just recycle it while you're cleaning it up
For metals cost, if energy is cheap and humans are spacefaring it would be exponentially cheaper as the asteroid belts are full of good ore. Having the vacuum of space and fision means refining ore is cheap. SLS is not as strong as forging as the orientation of the crystal are random. Forging and forming (if done right) causes optimal orientation. The video is showing cold forming and forging. We currently "3d weave" carbon fiber using 6axis cnc robotic arms. Lockhead has been playing with an exo skeleton for the past 20 years. Its used as an anti fatigue measure for carrying heavy items.
recently i learnt about secondary waves which are basically waves that change the shape of rocks and metals in the scene where the Mjolnir plates are being crafted the edges are more refined by an unknown source a possibility could be that artificial secondary waves are used to perfect the shape of the hard titanium used for Mjolnir Armour.
It is said in the lore somewhere that a single suit costs more than a ship. I don't remember if a particular class of ship is specified but I think we can safely assume that, a minimum, Chief's suit costs more than The Pillar of Autumn.
I think if you extrapolated the cost of a UNSC destroyer from a US Navy Aircraft Carrier you may be able to back out the Mark IV cost and then lump those unknown costs together. For Gen 3 though, I think they are more cost effective due to economies of scale as those individual dies would be used multiple times as noted in Rubicon protocol that Gen 3 armor is routinely replenished so it would stand to reason that there is a stock of replacement parts for each spartan. Great video!
Wow! This really put things into perspective regarding the price of these "mobile suits", essentially. They're basically expensive azz precursors to full-on Mecha suits!
I think you could make an analogy to the price of fusion energy technology compared to today with the price of a compact high capacity battery of today compared to consumer-available batteries of decades ago. They say the military has access to equipment analogous to consumer technology decades in the future. So for example a high grade consumer battery today would be worth several times as much 30-50 years ago. So imagine in Halo there are consumer-grade fusion reactors but they may be the size of gasoline generators of today, with Mjolnir fusion reactors representing what consumers may have available to them in another 30-50 years.
@Installation00 it's in the fall of reach books, the suit of armor costs about the same as a destroyer each. From what I can understand this includes the research, cloaning, the building of the suits, and the cybernetics and so on. The books also suggest the armor about as durable as the scorpion tank armor when they're getting ready to eject in shuttle in the middle of a jump stream to sneak into a covenant fleet. Then there's the gold wires installed in the heads of the soldiers. Not that expensive but the hookup to their liquid ceramic ballistic weave undersuit. We already have experemental versions, and theyre cheap materials, but expensive to run it. With current technology its not feasible but yeah, about half to three quarters of a billion dollars each. Now for current tech, We have titanium poly ceramic nitrogen foam that does nearly all of the thibgs you want the armor to make. Super expensive now cause we dont have it ready for production. The hud systems are all aready a thing, the thermal systems, titanium ballistic weave is becoming a thing, graphine fiber also a thing that would likely drastically reduce the weight and keep the durablity cause we didnt have the tech at the time. Using computer aided systems to augment the users movements is also currently a thing abd it can be found in naval canons and anti-shake spoons. Ill have to look for it, but we're like 40-60% there for a full on Spartan 0.5 system the only current problem is micro power, and we had backpack fusion generators being tested in 2019.
The neural and motor control computers have been in development and use* since about 2006.... It's wifi enabled. The super computer isn't a thing yet, but give it time. Then there's the fusion generator AND the micro collider that's currently the size of a laptop one is theory, the other is a few hundred thousand dollars but, still a thing.
As an aside, this has been bothering me a lot. Of course I refer to the seemingly decades age difference of characters between games. Johnson goes from looking 45 in CE, then maybe 38 in 2 only to look 60 in 3. Then Miranda looks like she's 20 in 2, then looking like shes 45 in 3. you'd think they would have at least tried to have some internal consistency.
I dont know enough about crochet to be completely sure about this but that was definitely the first thing I thought about when you were talking about the bodysuit. The 3-dimensional part. We currently can't create a machine that can crochet. It is a silly thought but little old grannies crocheting sweaters for the spartans. ^^
I've heard that a single Spartan armor is more expensive than a UNSC spaceship, which is wild to me. Like how in the heck is a massive fully functional spaceship more affordable compared to basic Spartan armor? Granted I don't know just how good Spartan armor is in lore but going by the games then I don't see where the heck the money is going into because it sure as heck isn't going into making it waterproof.
Somewhere between the cost of a Longsword and In Amber Clad for Spartan I-III programs, with the Spartan-III's Mjolnir on the lower end as they were more numerous and rushed. Though with the Spartan IV's it's probably come down to between a Scorpion MBT and a Hornet as they are mass-produced and cheaper after decades of refinement in production methods.
I think i heard once that these suits cost more than a frigate. I could be butchering that and maybe not that big but someone somewhere once said that they are around that field in cost. Again could be frigate could be pelican i don’t remember.
Little late to the convo, but never mind the cost of developing said power armor. Knowing the development cycle of current military tech, id imagine the development cost in the hundreds of billions.
I found this video a lot more interesting than I thought I would! Space manufacturing and trying gain advantages from zero-G casting is something I am a bit passionate about and the armor creation doesn't seem correct from a material science perspective. That is filling a die with near-molten material means the die would have to be hot or else the metal would start to nucleate and freeze at the die interface, which doesn't benefit the process at all and really just makes a headache being in zero G. IF the metal was undercooled (cooled below the freezing temperature but unable to solidify because of a lack of nucleation sites) THEN the metal could be precisely and repeatable solidified at a calculated rate (ranging from seconds to *enter seemingly crazy small amount of time* to solidify fully), giving known grain sizes, properties, and microstructure. Add in the free vacuum and you have an incredibly defect free process with a microstructure on the level of gen 6 turbine blades (we are developing gen 5 right now). A more realistic vision would be to have a neutral, defect free, gas at low atmosphere and use complex sound waves (AI to the rescue) to manipulate the metal into shape, then cool it off until it gets to the desired temperature and then introduce a seed crystal created prior to encourage the proper structure creation directionally (forces defects to the end). Lots of unknowns and what-ifs, but that is what I see as the future of advanced materials manufacturing. Additive is great, but I generally see its strength is that is will work the same no matter what. It can make the same shape just about anywhere so long as the powder is pure and it is in position. It has its own strengths that casting cannot do, like complex internal channels, but it doesn't leverage anything about space except perhaps the free vacuum but that also means the equipment would have to have beefed up cooling or run slower. Funny enough some additive manufacturers throw out extra powder post manufacturing (increases costs) and others recondition/recertify/sell it/whatever. _____ It is fun how the phase-change piezoelectric metal would move the suit. That alone would be rather complex to make work, since it would be like making a skin that crystalizes into scar tissue to pull an arm into position and then relaxes back into skin to let it down. Its forces would be spread out over the radius of the limb and not internal like a tendon PLUS there would be a volume change and crystal damage to account for. Failure to properly manipulate the articulating skin at any point could easily twist a limb wrong or cause muscle tears (which I think I remember something about this in a book). Seems like an alternate way to move things besides polymer muscles like Battletech, but theoretically also possible. On Nuclear Fusion: I've seen a nuclear fission reactor about the size of 1.25 the size of large wheeled luggage (interesting unit of measure, I know). Doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility to get a fusion reactor smaller with a lot of time, but the big rub would be converting the thermal energy to electrical and not generating too much waste heat. Maybe using a thermo-electric effect of some sort and advanced active cooling system? Not really knowledgeable on this, but I do know high quality crystals and space go hand-in-hand. The 3-d woven body glove reminds me of mathematical expressions visualized. They weave within themselves for many turns before eventually completing a single circuit. Once again AI would greatly reduce the time needed to find a solution. Not sure if zero-g would help with this one, but present techniques would be hard-pressed to manage manufacture without getting dangerously bloated with space and complexity. I could talk about this for many more paragraphs, but I will stop. Really interesting how plausible certain aspects of Spartan armor is with just a bit higher technology level and/or a boost in space manufacturing experience/capability.
If 1 credit is equal to 1 cent, wouldn’t the final price for the museum piece armor be around 12.5 billion credits instead of 125 million since the modern cost would be equal to 125 million dollars?
the metals themselves would be kinda expensive but i'd assume the nano technology, cybernetic systems and gel layer would be where the truly grevious expenses would be incurred. I haven't finished the video yet but I like to comment early and then test my original thesis against the information given in the video. cheers.
They could you adaptive dies when pressing the armor, so one for each variation, but they can change shape and size slightly to adapt towards each person
I wonder, have you done a deep dive on the calibers of various Halo ship weapons? I know you have a MAC video, but I was moreso wondering what caliber the dual multipurpose cannons that can be found on the pillar of autumn for example are.
I believe in one of the books it is mentioned that a suit of mjolnir costs as much as a destroyer. Assuming that the costs of destroyers for the UNSC are relatively similar to the costs of them today that would be 1 billion credits per suit.
I think to really estimate the cost you got to look at government contracts. In Halo they took the jackal shield and eventually made the energy shield. It took years of research effort to at first make very few shields. So the cost of each shield would be out of a large pool of expenses making them astronomically high in cost. Like dividing a billion dollars in research over maybe 8 shields in the field.
It's easy to spot that manufacturing MJOLNIR is a cool multi-trillion dollar (credit) enterprise. The UNSC/ONI does not need an economic "return on investment" for the suits and their upkeep. However, the projected costs of a second SPARTAN II class would've cratered the UNSC/ONI budget as the war escalated, thus no second class is created. It's also possible ONI didnt give Halsey more Spartans because she pissed someone off, or the creation of such forces would have pressured ONI by the UEG to go public with the SPARTAN Program as it would have dived (that) many funds and resources away from other war efforts. A trade off between secrecy and scaled growth. The sustainment & upkeep of armor systems for 100+ Spartan IIs was not economically possible during the Human-Covenant war. Resources and funding that would have caused MORE planets to burn or lest, unsuccessful mass evacuations and defense of human life from inevitably doomed worlds. It might all be ONI tinfoil hat facts at the end of the day. The UNSC, and the UEG economics of space manufacturing, can very much adhere to a "diminishing return" model of recouping resources and the refinement of the best materials for each and every thing in military application, and dumping the waste material during refinement, only allowing the BEST yields of resources be used at the manufacturing level. This is where the "costs as much as a fleet of ships" quote can be easily based off of. The sentence structure can apply to both the individual cost per suit, and or the overall technological enterprise. It is (and not) the "per unit" price of a suit (as no things consider yet the logistics of parts and software package upgrades) but the cost of upstarting the entire logistics chain of MJOLNIR and its manufacturing/ testing and sustained use. I think the molecular manufacturing of the suit itself is 1:1 with the costs of the micro-fusion reactor. The nanomolecular weaving of materials in a microgravity environment WHILE enabling a liquid crystal matrix to reactively move the suit, and keep ALL The systems inside structurally supported, functioning, bullet proof, CBRN, microgravity, extreme high heat grazing hits from plasma, with the body wearer, would be a wildly expensive process even for 26th century standards. More intricate systems not discussed would be such as the nanotechnology (plumbing of internal fluids), water, biofoam, waste management, hydrostatic gel, all very much are capillaries to the "second skin" philosophy. The armchair UEG economist in me says this can easily top $220 billion (credit equivalent?) per qualified initial suit and armor plating, nuclear reactor unit, etc. (And the spare parts for ALL those components, which there is very high probability, Spartan-II/III MJOLNIR suits may as well be Space Shuttles. If time-duration between missions allowed- the ENTIRE suits components that saw high cycle usage or near breakpoint failure from a single mission, would get swapped out- full stop. Spartans tasked to fleets or ONI task groups had their own logistics train in tow. Each suit basically new before each major campaign, resources pending. As SPARTANs were anticipated (expected) to basically save or destroy whole worlds and the inhabitants on them at any given notice. Undersuit maintenance notwithstanding (likely required a dedicated space stations worth of volume of facilities to replace nanomolecular level structures and recrystallization) The (per unit) price of the suit is proportional to the equivalent parts replacement and or pace of upgrades for each Spartan-II (and Spartan III using MJOLNIR) and their needs. This is to keep the argument within the 2525-2552 period of economics while humanity gets driven to extinction by the Covenant. In conclusion, it's definitely above 8 credits.
We haven’t actually even had a break even fusion reaction tho. If I recall, that publicized fusion reaction, while producing a decent amount of energy, didn’t produce as much as the energy used by the lasers required. Btw, what about armor with batteries? Also, why don’t Spartans or odsts, even just marines get sheilds of some sort. I feel like it would be cheaper and more protective like how the jackals are honestly pretty tanky if they couldn’t have their hands shot.
the problem with power capacitors is that you can only store so much energy in a given volume without getting into material science that we don't understand, and they have to be recharged, which isn't useful in Mjolnir's case if only because of expected deployment time. In addition, the added bulk and volume would make said capacitors significantly more dangerous in an active battlefield to practically use, thus they weren't considered in anything outside of the Cyclops, which is more of a cargo mover than a dedicated military platform.
They do have reactors in shipping containers that can be moved to support natural disasters pretty easily, so not bad compared to what they had back in the day
11:52 - 16:03 can you do a short or a video explaining a bit of what this is? I tried to look it up, but it’s kind of hard to understand what I am looking at And us having downloaded/encoded done anything like that sounds really cool
When I was a mechanical engineer I specialized in additive manufacturing so I got to work with a good amount of these metal '3d printers'. I wouldn't say they have negligible waste, but it is much less than traditional machining. For a typical laser powder bed fusion machine the waste comes from not just the support material (which is often machined off) but also the degradation of the recycled powder. The un-sintered powder gets vacuumed into a reclamation system. However due to its exposure to oxygen and/or proximity to the laser it stops performing the same and must be discarded at regular intervals. This powder is also expensive as hell and a hazard to work around. There is also typically a post-production process involving heat treatments, chemical treatments and possibly more machining. These machines can be as cheap as $100k (but aren't laser powder bed fusion in those cases) or as much as millions of dollars. Some of these machines are so large they have a staircase to walk up to the build chamber, even for a bed size of 2' x 2'. They often need to be assembled in an isolated room with specialized venting and utilities. Not every type of metal can be printed either. Sometimes it's the melting point of the material. Other times it's the reflectivity of the material, because it reflects the laser energy instead of absorbing it. It can even be due to how the material changes when heated and cooled, preventing a solid structure from creating at the required tolerances. All of this can be improved in the future though - 500 years is a long time. Just thought i'd add this interesting background information.
Something I would like to see, even if it's a paid feature, is your videos as downloadable audio files. I would like to see that added to your store or patreon, as that would allow me to listen to them more effectively. Don't know if that is worth the effort for you, but it is something I would like to see.
I think currently the best current adaption is to use a soft exo for the under-suit, maybe hard exo for running, and add the armor with battery. maybe the fall out power armor is easier. replace the fusion core with a gasoline electric generator. all hard exo
This is actually a rather simple question. The cost of a molijnir suit is revealed to us when admiral cole says "one spartan 2 costs as much as a battle group" as in a battle group of ships. We also know from halsey that the majoirty of the cost was in the development of the suits and cortana. An exact analogy for a battlegroup is a carrier strike force. Which can vary widely on the ships present however you're looking at approx 50b. The US and maybe russia and china would be able to field spartans in this regard.
The price of the NASA suits is not just the manufacture costs, but also the full cost of all R&D included in the project divided by the very low number of units.
That is a really interesting analysis. Other method for estimating the costs could be looking at real world military budgets for special ops teams and their hardware as a percentile compared to something else tangible such as an aircraft carrier. The Spartan program costs (even as elite as it was) had to be a small fraction of the operating costs of the rest of a functional military so it would have to be at a similar percentile comparison. The ratio of cost for Navy seals program vs cost of a single aircraft carrier should be similar to the military budget of Spartan program to the Pillar of Autumn... otherwise, the military would not be able to function in large-scale engagements if its budget was primarily consumed by a small spec ops program. For the USA, it costs $2million USD per Navy Seal and Aircraft Carrier costs $10.1 billion per ship.
While we aren’t given an exact credit value, in ‘Ghosts of Onyx’ one of the senior ONI officers says that a suit of Mjolnir Armor costs about as much as a destroyer to build and maintain. Taking a modern example, the US Arleigh Burke-Class Destroyer costs ~$2 billion per vessel. That ONI assessment was made in 2531 in reference to the Mark IV variant of Mjolnir, which was essentially the first field ready prototype. According to the lore, after the end of the Human-Covenant War new variants of Mjolnir became MUCH cheaper to produce. Even at their peak there were only ever a few dozen Spartan IIs or Mjolnir equipped Spartan III’s, but there are HUNDREDS of Spartan IV’s, so economics of scale has also likely brought down procurement costs. While the SEALs are an interesting point of comparison, Spartans are even more rare/elite. The US has ~2500 SEALs, who account for
@@michaelwhittaker5537 , very interesting lore dive!!! I do recall reading something like Spartans being as expensive as a warship. Sadly, if that really was the case, the Spartan project is likely a huge fiscal failure. The armor was only one part of the program. They also abducted children and raised them, gave them experimental augmentations will a high kill rate, and needed to raise & train them. The Spartan program was also started pre-Covenant war and was originally for spec ops against the human rebellions. While the Spartans had great ground campaign successes, that did not matter in the end when Covenant ships appeared and overran the UNSC fleet & glassed the planet. I guess their Hail Mary was using the Spartans to kidnap a High Prophet to negotiate for peace. In recent history, the highest percentile of the population engaging in modern warfare is around 10-20% (with the Soviet Union in WW2 draft being one of the most recent examples with 35 million drafted of a population of 200 million, so at around 18%). So having only 75 spartans with 39 billion population... likely 3.9 billion active military personnel... each wearing armor costing the price of a warship. It is a huge mismanagement of resources... considering they operate in teams of 4+ and need rest between operations and even if they had 100% success rate of ground target operations... unlikely they could change the outcome of a planetary engagement with such low numbers (fall of reach for example) and the war was primarily interstellar/interplanetary. The UNSC needed 3-to-1 numerical advantage of warships just to fight to a standstill or victory. Their focus should have been total war doctrine aimed at amassing warships to always maintain numerical superiority and maybe even mass suicidal remote drone ships. Interstellar wars cannot be won defensively, so the entire fleet should have gone to High Charity to nuke the planet and leadership early in the war as soon as the home world location was discovered. The Covenant was a theocratic dictatorship with a strict caste system and very disproportional living standards for different alien species. Without leadership, they would de-evolve into Civil War (seen even without an attack on their leadership). It was just a stroke of luck that Halsey's expensive pet project was such a decisive factor in obtaining victory but if they had really focused their military projects on the right programs, the war would have been stopped prior to the fall of reach and attack on earth that cost unimaginable devastation. With the fall of reach, humanity's major military industry hub had fallen and defeat was inevitable. If there was more warships, some of the narrow losses of the fleet may have been victories. During the final space campaign over Earth, the entire fleet was lost but was able to destroy the hundreds of ships in the Covenant fleet to only 40 ships. If they had 75 additional warships, instead of 75 spartans, they may have been able to fully hold (2:1 ratio but also had the extensive network of 300 orbital MAC guns to compensate)
One fun thing to consider is the big military thing of cost of assets versus cost of damage. It does to the enemy, and if you scaled that for the chief and his total damage he has done it basically cost nothing. The chief has probably done damage higher than the entire budget of the US military Multiple times over assuming the covenant uses currency in any way
Id say its above 8 credits
this should be pinned 📌
At least 8 credits
Sounds like a pretty safe bet
It’s at least 1 credit.
8 and a half
If I recall in one of the halo books, I think fall of reach actually. That the power supply for Mjolnir being the micro fusion pack is what a little over half the cost of Mjolnir goes to. I remember them saying at one point Mjolnir cost as much as a battle ship or a frigate or something like that in the earlier stages of the war, i'm sure the price has come down since then though.
We are looking at tens to hundreds of millions at the low end for a single suit. Think USN Cruisers or Destroyers in cost. Thats excluding R&D costs. So the whole program is in the Billions easily and probably $500M per suit easily for the S2's.
Yeah, i do believe that was in The Fall of Reach: they compared it with the cost of a destroyer. (Bit bigger than the Forward Unto Dawn, smaller than a cruiser like the Pillar of Autumn) But i can not remember if they were talking about Mark IV or Mark V. To compare that with a modern day destroyer: A new US Navy Arleigh Burke class destroyer costs around 1.4 billion dollars.
@@Troubleshooter11surely it wouldn’t be mark IV, no expensive energy shield
I think in fall of reach someone mentioned that it's worth as much as a battle group but I may be wrong.
I think there's a similar comparison in Ghosts of Oynx, when they're justifying the armor downgrade for the Spartan III's. I want to say the cost of a Mjolnir suit was comparable to a Destroyer, so a smaller warship but still a warship.
The Economics of Halo would be an intriguing idea for a series.
Maybe trying to calculate the cost of various weapons, vehicles, and ships.
This
I've been wondering since I heard a single suit costs as much as a destroyer. I guess it's similar to how an ultra high precision mechanical watch can cost as much as an expensive car.
i'd say the S2 program costs more than a destroyer + crew
lol, but a car is useful, unlike a turbowatch.
@@kcdodger but as a very rough comparison between size and cost, it's not bad.
That was stated before the Spartan project on the way to John 117 and the other recruits
Needless to say that was a speculative cost based on the Spartan 1 scale project and included research and adjustment.
They scaled that down most likely and well ‘hey those Spartans cost 100x what you said, what was all that research for if it could only be used on your selected few and we couldn’t pick any’
So yeah, the dislike of that stuff and the experimental shield tech probably made people annoyed.
Imagine if they got the Spartan 1 project running and it worked.
The Spartan 3 project can be seen as justified in comparison and makes sense given ‘Halsey selected her candidates now we’ll select ours’
For obvious reasons we somehow couldn’t have similar results with the Spartans 2s.
Personally I would prefer if we had Spartan 2s.
Then different branches of said series.
Such as Locke not being a Spartan four but something specific to ONI.
Then expand it to ODSTs.
I would then just expand the Spartan 3 project idea and have Spartan 2’s selected to train the next gen Spartans and go from there.
Then you get the issue of how much ‘humanity’ there is if your body is being augmented.
You could have people try and integrate Promethean tech into themselves or Index themselves to become Prometheans themselves under their own AI constructs and so on.
Possibly having Monitors adapt them into their own security systems and augmenting them like in ‘hunter in the dark’ and so on.
It could expand to possibly making the flood a possible research candidate and so on.
I would then argue Indies and possible anti alteration humanity… because hey if super humans are working on this why wouldn’t they make it so only super humans could run this equipment later with how advance it can get… and where would that leave the select few?
Remember the Spartan project was and still is intended for Inies, regular humans. All the aliens did was give them a more popular target.
It would make a lot of sense why ONI and the higher ups would be so against the spartan program in the beginning being unproven and so costly.
Whats even more insane, is that new version of the fusion pack, uses reverse engineered Covenant ship tech, where two points fire a laser to the material in the middle, creating a stable 'sun', creating leaps and bounds more energy than the old packs.
This directly relates to why the Chief can arm tank Atrioxs hammer, with his shields still in tact like its nothing...
The cost of Mjlnor must be in thr billions
Its been quoted in lore as being as expensive as UNSC Cruisers. So I'd say its up there.
I thought it was more like a star?
@@iliacdeleon1065 The sun is a star.
@@GiRR007 I know but I'm trying to know if RebelOfTheNorm meant as in the Fusion Pack of the Gen 3 is creating a energy akin to the sun inside the the fusion pack of the Gen 3, I know the Gen 1 Mark VII have a fusion pack that mixes the human engineered and reverse covenant engineered fusion reactor and some materials to create an environment for a star to form in inside the fusion pack, meaning it has tons of energy than the previous Mjolnir's and I'm wondering if the fusion pack of Mjolnir Gen 3 is more improved or advanced than Gen 1 Mark VII
@@iliacdeleon1065 Oh, yea gen 3 is probably slightly more powerful.
The armorer is one of the best characters, even though we see him for such a short time. Imagine, calling the Chief "Son" like he's just another Jarhead out of boot. I like to think Chief appreciated his candor.
Doesn't matter your rank or reputation, the chief quartermaster will ream your ass.
I like the little smirk that Blur Studios added in.
@@DetectiveLance The three people that will always out rank you no matter what are the _running demolitionist,_ the cook, and the quartermaster.
Now which of these outranks the other is up for questioning, but my money is on the demo until they stop running, _then_ it's the quartermaster.
I think you should've told this to the covenant...
That was an interesting idea towards the end of the video, the idea of a decommissioned MJOLNIR suit being put on display in a museum with all of its vital components stripped out, leaving only the undersuit and armor plating intact.
I would love a dev map that is based on that!!! That would be so cool!!!
Well since Mister Chief one of the AI's on infinite praises you he says something about "and that's why you cost 2 frigates" or something like that, even if we can't estimate how much credits are worth, it is insane how one single super soldier is worth that much
Considering what Spartans are capable of, I think they are well worth the price, best tax credits ever spent, just ask the rest of humanity after the Spartans (primarily Chief and Noble Team in game) saved humanity from extinction. If that isn't a good investment of resources, I don't know what is.
The insane part is that while the Covenant is more advanced tech and ship wise, the UNSC's Spartans are far more advanced and lethal than nearly anything the Covenant ever fielded on the ground (always had to outnumber and outgun Spartans to beat them similar to how UNSC had to do the same to beat Covenant ships with their own.)
@@erasablefallen7223 Halsey says in the Fall of Reach that a single Spartan is worth more (not necessarily monetarily) than a fleet of destroyers. So yeah I agree with your comment wholeheartedly
That still seems extremely low. Maybe for Gen2 suits. But Gen1 were stated to cost the same as a UNSC ship. A modern day Arleigh Burke class destroyer is $1.8 billion. That honestly sounds alot more realistic for Gen1 suits. And I'd bet Gen3 is probably similar, if not a bit lower since I'm sure they incorporated some of what they learned with Gen2 into 3.
It's been stated that the Knitted-crystal computer memory layer supposedly represents 80% of the cost of the suit. With this, his 125million estimate, reactive systems, and polymerized lithium niobecene brings the cost easily to the billions.
The ten 3 suits are both the cheapest and mos tpowerful. They cost about as much as a pelican.
An entire series of the cost of almost every UNSC Weapon, Vehicle, and Ship we know, would be a great series.
Before I even watched the video, this is actually gone over briefly in the LOR. The general expense for armor like master chief, was about the cost of one of the UNSC most expensive carriers or up to a similar cost of an entire UNSC battle group. It just depends on which Spartan armor you are referring to, and when the Spartan program officially started. For example, Spartan 2 Armor versus SPI armor.
That wasn’t a price tho
I'm just gonna put it as equivalent to between a custom made boutique tank with top STANAG armour and a T72B + Kontakt 5 ERA as new build
One of the things to consider when looking at military equipment acquisition costs is what the R&D costs are. The cost of each piece of Mjolnir would also include the total R&D costs (physical prototypes included) divided by the number of serialized/combat ready units produced. For Gen1 Mk. IV Mjolnir, the R&D would have been astronomically high, likely comparable to a current 5th gen fighter or bomber R&D program. Of the original 300 Spartans the training program was budgeted for, only 75 were selected, and of those just over 30 would ever be put in the field, the total average cost of R&D per suit ended up being almost 10x higher. So the R&D cost burden was very likely in the high 10s of millions of dollars, or even a bit over $100million per Gen1 Mk. IV unit. This is largely why NASA's space suites are so expensive. They have a high R&D cost spread out over a very limited number of suits
I think the closest thing we have to micro nuclear fusion power plants would be focus fusion. The process of nuclear fusion using the inherent instabilities within magnetic filaments to condense gasses into a plasmoid. This process is being worked on by a physicist, Eric Learner. It has the potential to be directly converted into electrical energy without going through a steam cycle. Even the potential device he's building and the other models of the device he's built are about the size of a refrigerator or small car like a Volkswagen beetle. So not really backpack size, however, give it a few centuries, it might get smaller.
A video on if it's possible to create the flood (as close as we can get with our science at least, we don't have neural physics obviously) would be super interesting installation00.
Don't do it. The man is working on a suit as close to lore accurate as possible. He might just pull off creating a flood analogue 😄
@@amdkillaplaysthen he'll make the array when the time comes
You want 500 dolla?
Yes
Didn't someone in-universe say there was a "ship-to-mjolnir" conversation rate of some kind? Would it be easier to figure out the price of a ship and deduce that way?
There are bits of lore stating that one suit costs as much as a small starship, so it might be interesting to use something like that as a refrence
Incredibly fascinating breakdown on a nearly impossible subject. The reality is we may never actually know for sure how much as there are so many variables we just can't account for. Great job regardless.
Another “Most detailed breakdown” of mark 7/VII would just make my day.
Best helmet and armor from 343 ever.
Imagine if the four most expensive components of Mjolnir armor weren't sci-fi tech, but real-world and dirt cheap?
Its mostly titanium..
In real life the plates of a mjolnir armor would not be that expensive..
The most expensive part are how the on board electronics , circuitry and it's required durability to take a gangbang level of constant beatings. How they miniaturize such components and it's capabilities to be used in very long deployments.
Just like in 40k it's equivalent to an astartes auto-senses or it's scanners and detectors plus it's AI complimentary is what makes it special and be the crunch of it's viable cost.
On top of all that there was also no mention of the energy shielding, something that even to the unsc is a relatively new technology. That can't be cheap either, would guess it would be another category in the unknown price
Shielding isn’t new buddy they had it over 30 years
I wonder how much marine and odst armor would cost respectively
Likely similar to our modern military kit.
Also just realised, hello mage! Lol
@@Whiskey2shots hi
At worst it'd probably be slightly more expensive than a modern soldier's kit. There's a lot of advancements in electronics and materials that the marines and ODSTs get in their gear, but ultimately its just a suit of normal unpowered armor.
ODST armor is vacuum capable and has its own oxygen supply, so its probably worth a couple kits of standard issue marine armor.
Bro I would sell my kidney for some ODST armor
Send this video to the Covenant
This makes the existence of Mirage IIC and Rakshasa cores much more understandable.
Even if the UNSC could just augment a bunch of soldiers into Spartan IV’s, the titanium MJOLNIR suits are so expensive that they could only give them to the best of the best Spartan IV’s.
one of the many reason why Power Armor is still an amazing yet costly venture in Sci-fi series, until with find a more effective material or lucrative resources to make mass produce Power Armor we'll be amazed that one in 12 UNSC Soldiers can utilize one and they're not a spartan. I need see that when it happens.
Could you cover the differences between Mjonir's tech suit and Crysis nano suit. I know youve covered both separately. But a comparison would be cool.
Things like the nanosuit symbiosis and your theory on how Mjonir reacts to its users movement.
I mean given the in universe stated costs of half a modern warship $125m for just the frame makes sense. A modern warship is around $1 Billion per ship. Given Mjolnir is literally cutting edge and has a whole heap of super classified experimental military tech 1/2 to 3/4 Billion is quite a reasonable estimate.
it is stated in lore that one suit of Mjolnir was equivalent in price to a Halberd Class Destroyer during the Human-Cov war and considering Naval Vessel are more valuable that one spartan bot alot of mjolnir was produced, which why most of the spartan 3's wore that semi-powered armour.
For the printing, I'd say that we could make a ceramic slurry that could be painted on in layers around a plastic 3d print of the desired armor component before having the plastic melt and flow out of the newly fired mold. With this now in place, assuming it's able to remain solid above the melting point of the desired casting material, such as the titanian our dear Irish narrator/researcher here. Once the cast is done, all that's needed is to chip and flake away the mold and trim and file off the sprues, slag, and residue from the mold material that formed in the holes that the casting material was poured into and where the metal and ceramic met during the casting.
7:00 that has got to be the coolest injection molder I have ever seen
Step one: dissolved titanium inside water
Step two: boil out water, forge titanium *mostly* together
Step three: heat up titanium via laser to solidify it, likely keeping it inside “kiln” for a few days to veery slowly cool off
Step four: sound reverberating through the foggy air at the end of the process rips off slag.
Fun video! I think there's a different way to approach this question which can, generally, point in the direction of an accurate estimate. Rather than breaking down the components of the armor (or whatever futuristic weapons system), their engineered and materials cost, additive value, etc, instead refer to project costs in terms of capability and use case. I.E. you should evaluate these costs the way the real defense industry and procuring governments do. What's a weapons system package that we today, regularly employ at our frontline, in which an individual soldier is tasked with the operation of a highly-iterated upon, cutting edge piece of hardware that costs exorbitant amounts of money? Fighter aircraft. The training alone of a modern US fighter pilot costs the Department of Defense millions before she or he even sits in the cockpit of a deployed asset. The fighter itself has a cost that is leveraged against a production run of the unit, estimated service life, maintenance costs, and how that cost will decline as the program is stood up. A common phenomenon of this is that the initially produced units will have a wildly higher on-paper cost than the final units, and the longer the service life of the unit (generally speaking) the more this nominal costs (vs the program itself) will drop. This is why a fighter like the F-35 Lightning II has such a high initial unit cost that declines as not only the procurement and upgrade program matures, but as more units are added for the same amount of research and development costs spun out at the start of the project. A convenient way to think of this is, we don't make the decision of what we'll eat based on the individual unit cost of a grain of rice or a single noodle in the bowl, we evaluate the value of the meal itself. Knowing this you can start to develop ideas about "how much, percentage wise, of its economy does the UNSC dedicate to defense spending? What does their economy look like?" You can start to make educated inferences there rather than try to divine the cost of technologies which don't exist yet. Compare like for like, rather than unlike to unlike.
This kind of thing is why I find it incredibly difficult to believe Spartans have anywhere near the amount of customization we are led to believe they have in their base armor.
The premise I would think would be that a Spartan has some input at the start of their armor's creation, but they would not be issued new helmets, new shoulders etc. unless it was deemed necessary at that time. Either based on mission requirements, or damaged components needing replacement. And I find it hard to believe so many variations would exist in the first place. Reach was already starting to stretch my believability a bit. But at least the customizations in that game were still parts that could be placed on top of the base suit, as opposed to the suit itself.
In H4, the customizations would replace large parts of the entire suit itself. It's hard to call the Wetwork set even Mjolnir, because aside from the undersuit none of it *was* Mjolnir. It introduced dozens of entirely customized entire suits, instead of just parts. And I always felt that jumped of the shark.
Infinite thankfully toned it down again, not in terms of parts but in terms of actual sets of armor. We have 4 canon cores, and 2 canon kits that effectively act as their own core as well. But most of them are just updates on previous armor designs *which makes sense* and all of them aside from arguably Rakshasa are actual Mjolnir armor. We can just put stuff on top of it, like H3 and Reach.
In terms of scaling the price of Mjolnir. It's been said that it is the second-most expensive piece of technology in human history, behind the slipspace drive. So the development of Mjolnir armor stands somewhere between the cost of building a Slipspace-capable ship, and whatever the third most expensive thing that exists in the Halo universe is. The idea that they could make a few hundred? Yeah I can get behind that. The idea that they can make thousands, or tens of thousands? The UNSC might consider that a worthwhile investment, after all they have developed thousands of ships. But when you take the personalization of that armor into account it starts to be a stretch. Only a small handful of variations of human slipspace-capable ships exist in the Halo universe *because* of how expensive and advanced the technology is. So as I said before, there would definitely be *some* level of customization available, but I think Infinite's little parts here and there on top makes a lot more sense than 4/5's full suits of custom armor components.
I'm pretty sure that when a sparten reaches a certain level of skill they are allowed to file a request to have a custom aromour made for them (when they first graduate as spartans they're given a standardised kit) which is why there's a lot less S4s with custom armour.
However when they do get custom armout they get input on what they want from the armout and its abiities, then the Spartan branch armourers take into account their specialisation (Combat mechanic, Medic, sniper, stealth ops, weapons expert...etc) and their skils to put together an armour for them. They only thing spartans have complete control over is the colour of the suit.
I belive they are allowed to have minor things added or tweaked (as in things like: armour attachtments, visor colour and coatings..etc) but the bigger things take a while or are simply not allowed outside of replacements for damage.
Page 45 of Ghosts of Onyx, and I quote 'Captain Rich's brows shot up. "I've never seen these figures before... MJOLNIR suit construction, maintenance staff, and recent upgrades to their microfusion plants. Christ! You could build a new battle group for what Halsey is spending."' I'm sure SOMETHING can be extrapolated from that.
I think it'd be easier to attempt to find what is in a battle group, break down the potential price for each ship, find the rough cost of a nuclear plant upgrade, the average spending on a military maintenance crew, figure out how many Spartans were active at the time Captain Rich was saying that, and MAYBE come close to an estimate and compare the estimate from this video and compare it to the estimate from what I just said, giving a possible range. Maybe going as far as looking at the average global inflation the the last hundred years and figuring out a possible inflation rate for the next 500 years, conservatively.
And the point is... The navy lost so much materale. Ship to ship was one sided. Pointless. Build more spartan IIs. They were the most effective weapon against the covies.
@@mikemoore2791 I said nothing that would bring this response up. I was just trying to say there is an alternate way to figure out the price of a suit of Mjolnir armor that might be a little more accurate. I said nothing about a ship being a better use of money. Nor did I say anything about a matchup or that Spartans were a bad use of the money.
I genuinely don't know why you responded at all. Why did you respond the way you did? Butthurt that someone responded on-topic and you didn't? Frustrated that someone is trying to find the price of a suit of fictional armor that a fictional sector of the fictional military from the fictional future wears? Did you feel attacked? please, make your response make sense.
I wonder if the ghost prototype suit would be more feasible to build a real world analog because of its size minus the flying bit cause ion thrusters just aren't there yet
It’s said that one of the reasons why the prototype suit wasn’t mass produced (aside from loss of blueprints) was because it is stated to be more expensive than Mjolnir.
We could probably build an exoskeleton at that size today, given some focus. The most insurmountable issue currently would be the power source, since we don't have viable fusion reactors even at normal sizes, let alone capable of being miniaturized to the point of installation into something that's roughly the size of a large car/truck.
I'm mostly talking out of my ass but I find the whole idea fascinating. Once power is solved, making hydraulics and actuators capable of moving the suit around like you see in the animation probably isn't possible. However I bet we could make something capable of walking/running without falling flat on its butt. Fitting armor and armaments, along with a fire control system to operate them would probably take a LOT of development but ultimately I think that's something we could figure out.
In the end though you'd basically be left with a more expensive, less stable, and less efficient tank, since you'd only have one human to move the thing and fire its weapons, whereas tanks have multiple crew members with distinct roles in combat. Still, it would be so goddamn cool to see in real life.
How is it that humans in Halo has all the technology to make MJOLNIR Armor in the way you described here, but they still use 7.62?
Based on what you say in this video, and since in lore I’m pretty sure I remember it being said that each suit is worth about as much as a UNSC destroyer
I would put anything in the realm of the billions to tens of billions of dollars as being reasonable
Not to mention that until recently in lore the Spartan program was extremely top-secret, so materials can only be acquired from specialty contractors, and there’s extra overhead on shipping and assembly, just from the sheer nature of it being a secret project
Each unit of mjolnir is essentially the equivalent of a United States aircraft carrier, in terms of value to the UNSC, and I’d imagine the price tag would reflect that
"You know how expensive this gear is son?"
Chief: nope, but im worth every credit
It’s definitely mentioned in the Fall of Reach that a suit costs as much as one battleship or another.
So not sure what that would equate to in a currency we would understand but definitely billions.
I do forget exact details though whether this was including an AI and whatnot.
In the books credits are the official currency. And credits also appeared in Reach as the current cy!
We actually have examples of metal presses in modern manufacturing.
They're *MASSIVE* machines that apply so much pressure to metals that they are formed into the shape of the dye; this is how most high end aircraft parts, and really anything with ridiculously high tolerance requirements, are made.
Needless to say, these machines are ludicrously expensive to build, and wouldn't really get to a point of being cheap with Halo's technology.
I'd assume, the ones we see, cost in the ballpark of hundreds of millions, or even billions, given their complexity. (In USD)
Hey Installation 00, long time fan here. I just read some science news that makes me happy, I think you’ll like this one!
Another piece of the incredibly detailed science fiction Eric Nylund and Joe Staten came up with has been tested IRL. In both Fall of Reach/The Flood/First Strike and Contact Harvest, we learn that long range space comms are hard lol duh and the medium/short range comms system in use by both the UNSC and the Covenant is a laser/maser system. Beaming info on light.
This was a natural progression from the (at the time) state of the art tech of fiber optics. It’s a somewhat obvious theory considering light is basically the limit for travel speeds for anything, so to move information at close to the speed of light is dope.
But anyways NASA’s Psyche mission has beamed information on a laser for the first time and that is some like straight up Halo shit and I’m happy
The metal work in space is forging not casting and is accomplished by heating up metal (not melting) and pressing it into shape with a mold which results in a much stronger and less brittle product because metal loses its best qualities when melted into a molten state and is very common in high end engine components.
Honestly, based off of everything you’ve said, the Halo lore wanting 300 Spartans but could only get half of the funding for (or so). And the UNSC is something of the equivalent to the UN. Based off of US currency, if those four items were actually somehow real. I’d say they would be astronomically more expensive than the 125m price tag you put. In todays money, I would give a hard guess of one spartan would cost the equivalent of 1-5 trillion dollars a suite. Whatever that would be in credits, 500 years from now.
Obviously today, the entire world is only worth maybe up to 100 trillion dollars (give or take). BUT, 500 years from now… hundreds of planets, population at maybe like 50-200 billion humans; obviously the economy will be leagues bigger than today. But even 500 years from now, an economy that huge, whatever the equivalent of 1-5 trillion is; that’s still a fuck ton of money for a few dozen soldiers.
That’s my guess lol…
Amourphous metal has amazing properties which would be ideal and cooled extremely quickly with liquid nitrogen immediately after casting and may be the reason it is not glowing after being pressed
I don't know, but it should be obtainable through gameplay and not just the in-game store!
Thare is another take here that could be used for a rough estimate of the cost for a fully functional suit. The price has been compared to a warship, so use the cost of a modern navy destroyer, assume a 1:1 currency conversion, factor in 500 years of inflation, and you should have a ballpark estimate.
In traditional manufacturing waste material is almost never "thrown away" like you said in fact most machines are designed to capture as much of the shavings as possible so they can be recycled and melted down and reused again. Especially titanium because you have to keep the workspace around titanium clean of crap anyway might as well just recycle it while you're cleaning it up
For metals cost, if energy is cheap and humans are spacefaring it would be exponentially cheaper as the asteroid belts are full of good ore. Having the vacuum of space and fision means refining ore is cheap.
SLS is not as strong as forging as the orientation of the crystal are random. Forging and forming (if done right) causes optimal orientation.
The video is showing cold forming and forging.
We currently "3d weave" carbon fiber using 6axis cnc robotic arms.
Lockhead has been playing with an exo skeleton for the past 20 years. Its used as an anti fatigue measure for carrying heavy items.
I remember in the book the armor cost being the cost of a UNSC ship. Could you do a UNSC Ship cost breakdown?
recently i learnt about secondary waves which are basically waves that change the shape of rocks and metals in the scene where the Mjolnir plates are being crafted the edges are more refined by an unknown source a possibility could be that artificial secondary waves are used to perfect the shape of the hard titanium used for Mjolnir Armour.
Mjolnir Armor will ALWAYS be cheaper than letting those Covenant bastards win...
It is said in the lore somewhere that a single suit costs more than a ship. I don't remember if a particular class of ship is specified but I think we can safely assume that, a minimum, Chief's suit costs more than The Pillar of Autumn.
Quick and to the point. Zero fat on that intro.
I think if you extrapolated the cost of a UNSC destroyer from a US Navy Aircraft Carrier you may be able to back out the Mark IV cost and then lump those unknown costs together. For Gen 3 though, I think they are more cost effective due to economies of scale as those individual dies would be used multiple times as noted in Rubicon protocol that Gen 3 armor is routinely replenished so it would stand to reason that there is a stock of replacement parts for each spartan. Great video!
Wow! This really put things into perspective regarding the price of these "mobile suits", essentially. They're basically expensive azz precursors to full-on Mecha suits!
I think you could make an analogy to the price of fusion energy technology compared to today with the price of a compact high capacity battery of today compared to consumer-available batteries of decades ago.
They say the military has access to equipment analogous to consumer technology decades in the future. So for example a high grade consumer battery today would be worth several times as much 30-50 years ago. So imagine in Halo there are consumer-grade fusion reactors but they may be the size of gasoline generators of today, with Mjolnir fusion reactors representing what consumers may have available to them in another 30-50 years.
@Installation00 it's in the fall of reach books, the suit of armor costs about the same as a destroyer each.
From what I can understand this includes the research, cloaning, the building of the suits, and the cybernetics and so on.
The books also suggest the armor about as durable as the scorpion tank armor when they're getting ready to eject in shuttle in the middle of a jump stream to sneak into a covenant fleet.
Then there's the gold wires installed in the heads of the soldiers. Not that expensive but the hookup to their liquid ceramic ballistic weave undersuit. We already have experemental versions, and theyre cheap materials, but expensive to run it.
With current technology its not feasible but yeah, about half to three quarters of a billion dollars each.
Now for current tech,
We have titanium poly ceramic nitrogen foam that does nearly all of the thibgs you want the armor to make. Super expensive now cause we dont have it ready for production.
The hud systems are all aready a thing, the thermal systems, titanium ballistic weave is becoming a thing, graphine fiber also a thing that would likely drastically reduce the weight and keep the durablity cause we didnt have the tech at the time.
Using computer aided systems to augment the users movements is also currently a thing abd it can be found in naval canons and anti-shake spoons.
Ill have to look for it, but we're like 40-60% there for a full on Spartan 0.5 system the only current problem is micro power, and we had backpack fusion generators being tested in 2019.
The neural and motor control computers have been in development and use* since about 2006.... It's wifi enabled.
The super computer isn't a thing yet, but give it time.
Then there's the fusion generator AND the micro collider that's currently the size of a laptop one is theory, the other is a few hundred thousand dollars but, still a thing.
As an aside, this has been bothering me a lot. Of course I refer to the seemingly decades age difference of characters between games. Johnson goes from looking 45 in CE, then maybe 38 in 2 only to look 60 in 3. Then Miranda looks like she's 20 in 2, then looking like shes 45 in 3. you'd think they would have at least tried to have some internal consistency.
From 22 minutes i probably understood 5 minutes of talk yet i was 100% entertained.
I read somewhere that “a single suit of mjolnir costs as much as a small starship”
I dont know enough about crochet to be completely sure about this but that was definitely the first thing I thought about when you were talking about the bodysuit. The 3-dimensional part. We currently can't create a machine that can crochet.
It is a silly thought but little old grannies crocheting sweaters for the spartans. ^^
I've heard that a single Spartan armor is more expensive than a UNSC spaceship, which is wild to me. Like how in the heck is a massive fully functional spaceship more affordable compared to basic Spartan armor? Granted I don't know just how good Spartan armor is in lore but going by the games then I don't see where the heck the money is going into because it sure as heck isn't going into making it waterproof.
I had read somewhere that the cost of 1 suit of armor cost as much as a UNSC Frigate!
"Tell that to the Covenant" 🤣
Somewhere between the cost of a Longsword and In Amber Clad for Spartan I-III programs, with the Spartan-III's Mjolnir on the lower end as they were more numerous and rushed. Though with the Spartan IV's it's probably come down to between a Scorpion MBT and a Hornet as they are mass-produced and cheaper after decades of refinement in production methods.
I think i heard once that these suits cost more than a frigate. I could be butchering that and maybe not that big but someone somewhere once said that they are around that field in cost. Again could be frigate could be pelican i don’t remember.
Little late to the convo, but never mind the cost of developing said power armor. Knowing the development cycle of current military tech, id imagine the development cost in the hundreds of billions.
I found this video a lot more interesting than I thought I would!
Space manufacturing and trying gain advantages from zero-G casting is something I am a bit passionate about and the armor creation doesn't seem correct from a material science perspective. That is filling a die with near-molten material means the die would have to be hot or else the metal would start to nucleate and freeze at the die interface, which doesn't benefit the process at all and really just makes a headache being in zero G. IF the metal was undercooled (cooled below the freezing temperature but unable to solidify because of a lack of nucleation sites) THEN the metal could be precisely and repeatable solidified at a calculated rate (ranging from seconds to *enter seemingly crazy small amount of time* to solidify fully), giving known grain sizes, properties, and microstructure. Add in the free vacuum and you have an incredibly defect free process with a microstructure on the level of gen 6 turbine blades (we are developing gen 5 right now).
A more realistic vision would be to have a neutral, defect free, gas at low atmosphere and use complex sound waves (AI to the rescue) to manipulate the metal into shape, then cool it off until it gets to the desired temperature and then introduce a seed crystal created prior to encourage the proper structure creation directionally (forces defects to the end). Lots of unknowns and what-ifs, but that is what I see as the future of advanced materials manufacturing.
Additive is great, but I generally see its strength is that is will work the same no matter what. It can make the same shape just about anywhere so long as the powder is pure and it is in position. It has its own strengths that casting cannot do, like complex internal channels, but it doesn't leverage anything about space except perhaps the free vacuum but that also means the equipment would have to have beefed up cooling or run slower. Funny enough some additive manufacturers throw out extra powder post manufacturing (increases costs) and others recondition/recertify/sell it/whatever.
_____
It is fun how the phase-change piezoelectric metal would move the suit. That alone would be rather complex to make work, since it would be like making a skin that crystalizes into scar tissue to pull an arm into position and then relaxes back into skin to let it down. Its forces would be spread out over the radius of the limb and not internal like a tendon PLUS there would be a volume change and crystal damage to account for. Failure to properly manipulate the articulating skin at any point could easily twist a limb wrong or cause muscle tears (which I think I remember something about this in a book). Seems like an alternate way to move things besides polymer muscles like Battletech, but theoretically also possible.
On Nuclear Fusion: I've seen a nuclear fission reactor about the size of 1.25 the size of large wheeled luggage (interesting unit of measure, I know). Doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility to get a fusion reactor smaller with a lot of time, but the big rub would be converting the thermal energy to electrical and not generating too much waste heat. Maybe using a thermo-electric effect of some sort and advanced active cooling system? Not really knowledgeable on this, but I do know high quality crystals and space go hand-in-hand.
The 3-d woven body glove reminds me of mathematical expressions visualized. They weave within themselves for many turns before eventually completing a single circuit. Once again AI would greatly reduce the time needed to find a solution. Not sure if zero-g would help with this one, but present techniques would be hard-pressed to manage manufacture without getting dangerously bloated with space and complexity.
I could talk about this for many more paragraphs, but I will stop. Really interesting how plausible certain aspects of Spartan armor is with just a bit higher technology level and/or a boost in space manufacturing experience/capability.
If 1 credit is equal to 1 cent, wouldn’t the final price for the museum piece armor be around 12.5 billion credits instead of 125 million since the modern cost would be equal to 125 million dollars?
Yeah lol! after all that work he tripped at the end.
9:58 expect a really loud chirp if your wearing earbuds turn your volume down
I love halo MasterChef never removes his helmet because its a sign of fear
the metals themselves would be kinda expensive but i'd assume the nano technology, cybernetic systems and gel layer would be where the truly grevious expenses would be incurred. I haven't finished the video yet but I like to comment early and then test my original thesis against the information given in the video. cheers.
They could you adaptive dies when pressing the armor, so one for each variation, but they can change shape and size slightly to adapt towards each person
Start with the smallest and machine it to fit the next size up.
The micro nuclear plant would in all likelihood not be the most expensive thing in the suit simply due to the small size of it.
Also, the fusion packs are cheap enough to have marines be equipped with larger, yet less powerful versions, but till fusion packs nonetheless
I wonder, have you done a deep dive on the calibers of various Halo ship weapons? I know you have a MAC video, but I was moreso wondering what caliber the dual multipurpose cannons that can be found on the pillar of autumn for example are.
Halo 2A has some of the best looking cutscenes ever. I zoned out for the first few minutes on the visuals
I believe in one of the books it is mentioned that a suit of mjolnir costs as much as a destroyer. Assuming that the costs of destroyers for the UNSC are relatively similar to the costs of them today that would be 1 billion credits per suit.
I think to really estimate the cost you got to look at government contracts. In Halo they took the jackal shield and eventually made the energy shield. It took years of research effort to at first make very few shields. So the cost of each shield would be out of a large pool of expenses making them astronomically high in cost. Like dividing a billion dollars in research over maybe 8 shields in the field.
It's easy to spot that manufacturing MJOLNIR is a cool multi-trillion dollar (credit) enterprise. The UNSC/ONI does not need an economic "return on investment" for the suits and their upkeep. However, the projected costs of a second SPARTAN II class would've cratered the UNSC/ONI budget as the war escalated, thus no second class is created. It's also possible ONI didnt give Halsey more Spartans because she pissed someone off, or the creation of such forces would have pressured ONI by the UEG to go public with the SPARTAN Program as it would have dived (that) many funds and resources away from other war efforts. A trade off between secrecy and scaled growth. The sustainment & upkeep of armor systems for 100+ Spartan IIs was not economically possible during the Human-Covenant war. Resources and funding that would have caused MORE planets to burn or lest, unsuccessful mass evacuations and defense of human life from inevitably doomed worlds.
It might all be ONI tinfoil hat facts at the end of the day. The UNSC, and the UEG economics of space manufacturing, can very much adhere to a "diminishing return" model of recouping resources and the refinement of the best materials for each and every thing in military application, and dumping the waste material during refinement, only allowing the BEST yields of resources be used at the manufacturing level.
This is where the "costs as much as a fleet of ships" quote can be easily based off of. The sentence structure can apply to both the individual cost per suit, and or the overall technological enterprise.
It is (and not) the "per unit" price of a suit (as no things consider yet the logistics of parts and software package upgrades) but the cost of upstarting the entire logistics chain of MJOLNIR and its manufacturing/ testing and sustained use. I think the molecular manufacturing of the suit itself is 1:1 with the costs of the micro-fusion reactor. The nanomolecular weaving of materials in a microgravity environment WHILE enabling a liquid crystal matrix to reactively move the suit, and keep ALL The systems inside structurally supported, functioning, bullet proof, CBRN, microgravity, extreme high heat grazing hits from plasma, with the body wearer, would be a wildly expensive process even for 26th century standards. More intricate systems not discussed would be such as the nanotechnology (plumbing of internal fluids), water, biofoam, waste management, hydrostatic gel, all very much are capillaries to the "second skin" philosophy.
The armchair UEG economist in me says this can easily top $220 billion (credit equivalent?) per qualified initial suit and armor plating, nuclear reactor unit, etc. (And the spare parts for ALL those components, which there is very high probability, Spartan-II/III MJOLNIR suits may as well be Space Shuttles. If time-duration between missions allowed- the ENTIRE suits components that saw high cycle usage or near breakpoint failure from a single mission, would get swapped out- full stop. Spartans tasked to fleets or ONI task groups had their own logistics train in tow. Each suit basically new before each major campaign, resources pending. As SPARTANs were anticipated (expected) to basically save or destroy whole worlds and the inhabitants on them at any given notice. Undersuit maintenance notwithstanding (likely required a dedicated space stations worth of volume of facilities to replace nanomolecular level structures and recrystallization)
The (per unit) price of the suit is proportional to the equivalent parts replacement and or pace of upgrades for each Spartan-II (and Spartan III using MJOLNIR) and their needs. This is to keep the argument within the 2525-2552 period of economics while humanity gets driven to extinction by the Covenant.
In conclusion, it's definitely above 8 credits.
I’d also like to point out that the unsc makes significant use of the Astriod field called the ort cloud
We haven’t actually even had a break even fusion reaction tho. If I recall, that publicized fusion reaction, while producing a decent amount of energy, didn’t produce as much as the energy used by the lasers required. Btw, what about armor with batteries? Also, why don’t Spartans or odsts, even just marines get sheilds of some sort. I feel like it would be cheaper and more protective like how the jackals are honestly pretty tanky if they couldn’t have their hands shot.
the problem with power capacitors is that you can only store so much energy in a given volume without getting into material science that we don't understand, and they have to be recharged, which isn't useful in Mjolnir's case if only because of expected deployment time. In addition, the added bulk and volume would make said capacitors significantly more dangerous in an active battlefield to practically use, thus they weren't considered in anything outside of the Cyclops, which is more of a cargo mover than a dedicated military platform.
Good to see you back again
They do have reactors in shipping containers that can be moved to support natural disasters pretty easily, so not bad compared to what they had back in the day
Could you do a Jiralhanae autopsy someday? That would be awesome.
125mil paper weight i like the sound of that… oh you got a map that keeps rolling up heres my ton lbs paper in the shape of a toy soldier
11:52 - 16:03 can you do a short or a video explaining a bit of what this is? I tried to look it up, but it’s kind of hard to understand what I am looking at
And us having downloaded/encoded done anything like that sounds really cool
When I was a mechanical engineer I specialized in additive manufacturing so I got to work with a good amount of these metal '3d printers'. I wouldn't say they have negligible waste, but it is much less than traditional machining. For a typical laser powder bed fusion machine the waste comes from not just the support material (which is often machined off) but also the degradation of the recycled powder.
The un-sintered powder gets vacuumed into a reclamation system. However due to its exposure to oxygen and/or proximity to the laser it stops performing the same and must be discarded at regular intervals. This powder is also expensive as hell and a hazard to work around.
There is also typically a post-production process involving heat treatments, chemical treatments and possibly more machining.
These machines can be as cheap as $100k (but aren't laser powder bed fusion in those cases) or as much as millions of dollars. Some of these machines are so large they have a staircase to walk up to the build chamber, even for a bed size of 2' x 2'. They often need to be assembled in an isolated room with specialized venting and utilities.
Not every type of metal can be printed either. Sometimes it's the melting point of the material. Other times it's the reflectivity of the material, because it reflects the laser energy instead of absorbing it. It can even be due to how the material changes when heated and cooled, preventing a solid structure from creating at the required tolerances.
All of this can be improved in the future though - 500 years is a long time. Just thought i'd add this interesting background information.
Something I would like to see, even if it's a paid feature, is your videos as downloadable audio files. I would like to see that added to your store or patreon, as that would allow me to listen to them more effectively. Don't know if that is worth the effort for you, but it is something I would like to see.
Can’t be as expansive as the Amour Set Bundle being sold in the shop in the Halo Infinite…
I think currently the best current adaption is to use a soft exo for the under-suit, maybe hard exo for running, and add the armor with battery.
maybe the fall out power armor is easier. replace the fusion core with a gasoline electric generator. all hard exo
The forearm gauntlet was produced in microgravity which is currently being utilized to help engineer organ 3-D printers at the ISS.
Yay it’s a good day when you upload
I'm sorry the helmets CASE....ITS CASE ... COST YOU 19K?
my respect for your craft just skyrocketed by about a parsec dude Jesus Christ bravo
This is actually a rather simple question. The cost of a molijnir suit is revealed to us when admiral cole says "one spartan 2 costs as much as a battle group" as in a battle group of ships. We also know from halsey that the majoirty of the cost was in the development of the suits and cortana. An exact analogy for a battlegroup is a carrier strike force. Which can vary widely on the ships present however you're looking at approx 50b. The US and maybe russia and china would be able to field spartans in this regard.
The price of the NASA suits is not just the manufacture costs, but also the full cost of all R&D included in the project divided by the very low number of units.
That is a really interesting analysis. Other method for estimating the costs could be looking at real world military budgets for special ops teams and their hardware as a percentile compared to something else tangible such as an aircraft carrier. The Spartan program costs (even as elite as it was) had to be a small fraction of the operating costs of the rest of a functional military so it would have to be at a similar percentile comparison. The ratio of cost for Navy seals program vs cost of a single aircraft carrier should be similar to the military budget of Spartan program to the Pillar of Autumn... otherwise, the military would not be able to function in large-scale engagements if its budget was primarily consumed by a small spec ops program.
For the USA, it costs $2million USD per Navy Seal and Aircraft Carrier costs $10.1 billion per ship.
While we aren’t given an exact credit value, in ‘Ghosts of Onyx’ one of the senior ONI officers says that a suit of Mjolnir Armor costs about as much as a destroyer to build and maintain.
Taking a modern example, the US Arleigh Burke-Class Destroyer costs ~$2 billion per vessel.
That ONI assessment was made in 2531 in reference to the Mark IV variant of Mjolnir, which was essentially the first field ready prototype. According to the lore, after the end of the Human-Covenant War new variants of Mjolnir became MUCH cheaper to produce. Even at their peak there were only ever a few dozen Spartan IIs or Mjolnir equipped Spartan III’s, but there are HUNDREDS of Spartan IV’s, so economics of scale has also likely brought down procurement costs.
While the SEALs are an interesting point of comparison, Spartans are even more rare/elite.
The US has ~2500 SEALs, who account for
@@michaelwhittaker5537 , very interesting lore dive!!! I do recall reading something like Spartans being as expensive as a warship.
Sadly, if that really was the case, the Spartan project is likely a huge fiscal failure. The armor was only one part of the program. They also abducted children and raised them, gave them experimental augmentations will a high kill rate, and needed to raise & train them. The Spartan program was also started pre-Covenant war and was originally for spec ops against the human rebellions.
While the Spartans had great ground campaign successes, that did not matter in the end when Covenant ships appeared and overran the UNSC fleet & glassed the planet.
I guess their Hail Mary was using the Spartans to kidnap a High Prophet to negotiate for peace.
In recent history, the highest percentile of the population engaging in modern warfare is around 10-20% (with the Soviet Union in WW2 draft being one of the most recent examples with 35 million drafted of a population of 200 million, so at around 18%).
So having only 75 spartans with 39 billion population... likely 3.9 billion active military personnel... each wearing armor costing the price of a warship. It is a huge mismanagement of resources... considering they operate in teams of 4+ and need rest between operations and even if they had 100% success rate of ground target operations... unlikely they could change the outcome of a planetary engagement with such low numbers (fall of reach for example) and the war was primarily interstellar/interplanetary.
The UNSC needed 3-to-1 numerical advantage of warships just to fight to a standstill or victory. Their focus should have been total war doctrine aimed at amassing warships to always maintain numerical superiority and maybe even mass suicidal remote drone ships. Interstellar wars cannot be won defensively, so the entire fleet should have gone to High Charity to nuke the planet and leadership early in the war as soon as the home world location was discovered.
The Covenant was a theocratic dictatorship with a strict caste system and very disproportional living standards for different alien species. Without leadership, they would de-evolve into Civil War (seen even without an attack on their leadership).
It was just a stroke of luck that Halsey's expensive pet project was such a decisive factor in obtaining victory but if they had really focused their military projects on the right programs, the war would have been stopped prior to the fall of reach and attack on earth that cost unimaginable devastation. With the fall of reach, humanity's major military industry hub had fallen and defeat was inevitable. If there was more warships, some of the narrow losses of the fleet may have been victories.
During the final space campaign over Earth, the entire fleet was lost but was able to destroy the hundreds of ships in the Covenant fleet to only 40 ships. If they had 75 additional warships, instead of 75 spartans, they may have been able to fully hold (2:1 ratio but also had the extensive network of 300 orbital MAC guns to compensate)
One fun thing to consider is the big military thing of cost of assets versus cost of damage. It does to the enemy, and if you scaled that for the chief and his total damage he has done it basically cost nothing. The chief has probably done damage higher than the entire budget of the US military Multiple times over assuming the covenant uses currency in any way
"you know how expensive this is, son?"
"no, do you?"
"actually no... might be 20 cents, 20 billion."