Nuclear Lunchbox wrote:Interesting thought here. How much cheaper might it be to build something like JA than an Evangelion? If a government spec'd into building multiple JAs, it might be enough to give an Angel a run for its money. By economic standards, it would be the path to take: competition yielding the most monetarily efficient method to deal with the Angels. Of course, that line of action wouldn't be desirable to Gendo or Seele-- but it could have worked.
Admittedly I don't have any solid figures to go by, but generally speaking it is much faster and cheaper to make a conventional robot than it would be to make a comparable life form in a laboratory (especially a cyborg like an evangelion, since it uses an extremely rare DNA type and requires advanced cybernetics to integrate its mechanical and organic components, not to mention the neural control system for the pilot, etc.) I seem to recall a hamburger patty being grown in a laboratory a little while back. I can't remember the exact cost to produce it, but it was in the tens-of-thousands of dollars (US) range, if that gives you any idea of how much an eva might cost by comparison. I'm going to see if I can find the exact price for that burger patty.
EDIT: Wow, I was way off. That 5-ounce patty cost $330,000 US to produce! Here's the article.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/lab-grown-beef-taste-test-almost-like-a-burger/2013/08/05/921a5996-fdf4-11e2-96a8-d3b921c0924a_story.html