What I would never understand is why anyone would ever scuttle

>>1500533
The French are stupidly stubborn and Anglophobic at times.

>>1500533
ships aren't just like a car that you get in, turn the key, and drive off in

you need to be fully manned to leave quick and be at least somewhat supplied

ships in port at home only have like 25% of the crew nearby at any time and it'd take a long time for that 25% to get everything going/supplied

easier to just send some petty officers around with explosives

>Is it so the Italians couldn't have them?
exactly
>'if we cant have them then no one can'

>>1500533
If you have to leave your ship and don't scuttle it you've just handed your enemy a new ship. Back in the day ships took a really long time to build, now with all the tech in them losing something like an intact air craft carrier would be devestating
So that's why you scuttle it if things look really bad

It takes hours to get a warship capable of moving even if it's in a "ready" state. Ships are big as hell. Think about how hard it is for a big ass diesel truck to accelerate, now take into consideration this truck is 100,000x times as large, requires several hundred people to press the pedal and several hundred other people to make sure the pedal doesn't break, and another few hundred people to make sure the other hundreds of people working the pedals don't starve, and of course at least a hundred people to steer the fuckin thing.
Ships were scuttled when they were incapable of leaving port before a hostile force would reach them.

Its such a shame, you spent hundreds of millions of dollars and years of work to build these things, but you just blow the while thing up because it wasnt ready

>>1500533
>The French, rather than leave port and escape to England, blew up most of its Battleships while they were in port.

These people were living WW2, not looking back at it
In 1940, there was no way to know Germany would be defeated
Going to England to keep fighting meant being exiled from France maybe forever if the Germans werent beaten
These people had families in France, so they'd rather serve the current regime, doing what they could to sabotage the Germans, than leave and maybe never see their loved ones again

Some had the courage to go to England despite not knowning the future, but you can't expect the average father/husband to do that

>>1500533
>The Ming dynasty burn all of its exploration junks into heaps after they were done using them.
Because the Treasure Fleet wasn't for exploration, it was for show.

Its mission was to dazzle the Spice Route states into trading with China. Literally the only exploration bit of that voyage was Zheng He being ordered to go past Oman, which is the last stop of Chinese ships and merchandise, and see what else lies beyond, which he did along the way.

Besides they probably burned down the palace-ships, and not the naval ships that accompanied it.

>>1501095
Wouldnt it have made for sense to just auction off the ships instead of just burning them? Sell a palace ship to some arab prince for a pretty penny. At least then you would get something out of it instead of just making it into floating charcoal

>>1501109
>at least get something out of it
You're talking about an empire that built the largest ships the world had seen just to fill them with all the treasure in the country and go on gift-giving expeditions like Santa Claus to show how incredibly rich and advanced they were to all those bumpkins who fancied themselves kings and emperors.

You don't give a homeless guy 5 bucks and then ask "hey by the way would you like to buy this sandwich, I don't want it anymore and I need the cash". You just give him the sandwich.


I'm surprised they didn't offer the ships themselves though. Maybe surrendering ships was viewed poorly, maybe they didn't want to see those petty rulers parading around on some giant vessel they couldn't even build, maybe none of them could have afforded the expense of maintaining the ships.

>>1501068

The destruction of the fleet was in 1942, in November IIRC. The writing was already on the wall for Germany by that point.

>>1501230
The writing was already on the wall for Germany by that point.
That's bullshit actually, Germany was not in an irreversible position until American and British forces were on the continent and the Russians could no longer be beaten in the summer.

>>1501252

Their advances were stalling, the Western allies were finally on the counterattack, even if only in the tertiary theater of North Africa, and nobody was backing down.

Given that the UK alone was outproducing Germany's war machine, nevermind the Soviets or the fucking Americans, yes, the writing was on the wall. At that point, it was a question of when and how bloody, not if.