The Royal Navy identified a need for twelve Type 45 destroyers, ordered nine, and accepted six. The approximately half-billion-pound construction cost was separate from the development bill that remained after the class was cut. A rough calculation suggests that building all twelve would have lowered the average program cost per ship to about two-thirds of a billion pounds. Shrinking the class made each surviving ship look extravagantly expensive even as serial construction became cheaper.
Notable Point · 1:31:28-1:32:58
How cutting Type 45 numbers inflated the headline cost
The Type 45 example shows how spreading fixed development costs across six ships produced the misleading billion-pound-destroyer label.