I should note, BA, that I'm thinking of lease pricing in terms of a bit more than "here, have incentive to not scrap stuff already built and sell it for metal price" instead of "Earthside military-industrial-complex pricing"... and I can't see there *not* being an upper limit on what the Convention would be willing to shell out in total. But there's no reason why it shouldn't be possible to at least remain financially solvent and all, or do something like use the income from that to springboard development of stuff for consumer use. You know, peace dividend and all. 
These are sort of my ideas how to balance things and keep everyone happy... others can feel free to chip in, in fact please do so. At a meta level, I'm trying to figure out how to scale things to where there's some incentive for people with enough interest to keep doing some R&D and production, but within limits - over the long term, encourage things that are affordable for their capabilities and efficient in terms of manpower, and decommission things that are getting long in the tooth and obsolete. I don't want to stop people from developing new wargear if that's what they really ICly and OOCly want to be doing (I mean hell, VVS is going to occasionally do stuff in that vein too even if that's not our primary focus) but similarly I don't want to make it so profitable to do so that it would be draining the Convention's coffers (because really, there is a lot of other stuff that is going to need doing) or creating an alloy overcast (because past a point it's asking for trouble).
These are sort of my ideas how to balance things and keep everyone happy... others can feel free to chip in, in fact please do so. At a meta level, I'm trying to figure out how to scale things to where there's some incentive for people with enough interest to keep doing some R&D and production, but within limits - over the long term, encourage things that are affordable for their capabilities and efficient in terms of manpower, and decommission things that are getting long in the tooth and obsolete. I don't want to stop people from developing new wargear if that's what they really ICly and OOCly want to be doing (I mean hell, VVS is going to occasionally do stuff in that vein too even if that's not our primary focus) but similarly I don't want to make it so profitable to do so that it would be draining the Convention's coffers (because really, there is a lot of other stuff that is going to need doing) or creating an alloy overcast (because past a point it's asking for trouble).