Japanese-American Perspectives

A Japanese website called SciencePortal recently published an article about the costs of building a real-life GUNDAM robot. They list the costs as follows:

Code:

Honeycomb Aluminum Boards     8,775,000,000yen
Manufacturing                26,325,000,000yen
Main Computer (IBM)             171,000,000yen
Gas Turbine Engines (GE) x7  39,900,000,000yen
Superconducting Motors x 30     840,000,000yen
Motor Drivers x 30              840,000,000yen
Sensor                          100,000,000yen
Cockpit                          50,000,000yen
===============================================
Grand Total                  79,521,000,000yen

That works out to roughly $742 million to build a real-world GUNDAM. Unfortunately, there are two problems that arise.

1. The GUNDAM robot is roughly 18 meters high and weighs 43.4 tons. A person the same height would weigh roughly 432 tons. The robot would be able to walk, but not fly. And no one would probably be able to ride in the cockpit. The legs may also not be strong enough to withstand the forces of gravity when running. How to create such a light-weight robot at that size that can also run and fly would most likely raise costs even more and require a higher level of technology.
2. The cost performance of a real-world GUNDAM robot probably wouldn't make much sense unless you can overcome the problems outlined above.

There's more to the rest of the article, but that's it for the GUNDAM part. If you guys are really interested in knowing of what more is written, I'll post it up.

LINKAGE (it's in Japanese)