Many japanese cruisers were fairly succesful in World War 2 but which one accomplished the most? Haguro who fought in 9 battles or Chokai which was the flagship at the battle of Savo Island in which four allied heavy cruisers were sunk?
To a layman like me, the drawbacks of the tumblehome design apear to be quite obvious. Actually, how bad was the design both in terms of stability as well as reduced internal volume relative to surface area? And what was the reasoning of ship desginers who choose this design? Were they ignorant or indifferent of the issues, or - as I assume - simply thought that the sacrifice was worth it?
I have a book on battleships where the entry for the Massena has a picture of a Japanese cruiser. I'd always assumed this was a mistake. Now, I wonder if it was to spare readers the horror...
French Naval Gun Designer: The navy is asking us to produce more guns. What caliber should we make our new weapons? His team: (starts up the lottery ball machine) Dunno. Let's find out.
You're forgetting that when the French dropped the Jeune École strategy, they replaced it with stratégie de Baldrick, a plan as cunning as a fox, who's just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford university, to defeat the Royal Navy by showing up in such outrageous ships, half the RN laugh themselves to death, and those that survive will insist on fighting blindfold so they can no longer see the French ships.
“So, french naval designer, what is the calibre of our main battery?” “30 D20” “what” *rolls 30 D20 dice like a power gamer in D and D* “That many millimetres” “and the secondaries” *brings out more dice*
To be fair the rate of progress in gun and armour technology in that era was astounding. You could pick a gun at the start of ship design and it could be obsolete before the ship entered service, in turn rendering the ship worthless prior to completion. The British correctly concluded that the simplification of ammo and guns would benefit their large global fleet more than regular gun switches, and as a result tried to innovate and maximize the potential of each gun chosen by improving the ammo/propellant. This worked well enough. But. Most other navies tried to grab the cutting edge of technology and had ship after ship with unique guns.
Such a beautiful ship,made with purely function in mind, it looks like it could seamlessly cut throught the waves. The aerodynamic design is so sexy even scharnhorst doesn't compare. Perfection indeed
Most steam punk of all navies, even their later stuff was extremely unusual. The Fantastique class, newer steam punk. French Art Nouveau and Art Deco styling to the max.
how about the austrian-hungarian pre dreadnought Zrinyi? My grandfather was in the US Navy and was on this ship as a capture crew member for about a year. he was originally on a sub chaser out of Groton,Cn. I even have a post card(austrian origin)that he sent home where he tells about the ship. post card was inside an envelope. quite an interesting post war history.
Drach has already done a video on the Radetzky class. Given the relative lack of adventures that the Austro-Hungarian capital ships got up to, I'm not sure he'd ever do a specific video about just Zrinyi. Cool to hear that about your grandfather, I always wondered what it was like for the US sailors who got to crew her in her last years. Her old crew must have been much happier giving her over to the Americans rather than the Italians.
@@connormclernon26 feb. 3, 1919. dear friends, here she is former austrian-hungarian battleship zrinyi. the next nation to own her is to be decided by peace conference. she has 4, 13 inch guns. 8, 10 inch guns. 16, 4 inch guns. also torpedo tubes. she was built about 10 years ago. she burns crude oil and coal. goodnight Boice. (Boice was driving a truck in the mountains of western Pa. in may 1934 when the truck lost it's brakes. he died a few days later leaving a wife and 5 kids. during the height of the depression. his widow never remarried. Boice was my grandfather) Boices' G G G grandfather was John McFadden, a veteran of the revolution, battle of upper sandusky ohio 1782.
I can't help but wonder if the ugliness of the ship was a planned defence mechanism that would cause enemy sailors eyes to bleed every time they looked at it.
This is one ship among many that I really wish we had in World of Warships! I am hoping that this game advances and there are more pre dreadknots. Ships like this absolutely deserve to be played!
It didn't shoot itself. It shot something else and because it was close, a shell splinter damaged it. May more ships have uneventful lifespans like this, it means less wars and fighting happening.
So ugly they're cool. I gotta admit I like weird. Made for a nice breakwater. Too bad the Ottoman Empire couldn't have salvaged it as a cheap seaside hotel.
Admittedly I like the very strange designs. But that might be the German in me. It's a nice break from our excruciating efficiency. Certainly line of our pre dreadnoughts against the line of theirs would have been a most interesting sight.
@@benbaselet2026 But that's how it ended up anyway. Steampunk is the visual language of impractical mechanics. Compare to contemporary Majestic-class. Much tamer looks, much better ship.
Drach, old boy, you must appreciate that these ships are works of art! They are absolutely wonderfully steampunk krazy. If there was just one left on display I guarantee that the turnstile turnover would more than compensate the cost of storage.
That'd be great! That being said, what I would love more than anything would be an open world WoWs. Imagine running around the Falkland islands in your Scharnhorst running into British battlecruisers. No more of that children's toy 12 v 12 battles.
How can you not love it, this wonderful hybrid of a French BD comic design and a Manga as an illustration of Jules Verne or Michael Moorcock based steampunk story. And it even swims, is this not amazing.
Love the tumblehome hull form and the cut down bow. Almost looks like a ram bow, but it was probably there to reduce blast damage from the forward gun.
Using this hot mess as a breakwater was brilliant! Probably the most useful thing ever done with the ugly sucker! "Avert your eyes!" is right, man! They should have called the thing Medusa!
I love the look of this ship, it may not be to most nautical taste, but there is something about these French ships. This is probably the final iteration of ( Fierce Face ) in French tactical doctrine with three heavy guns brought to forward bearings, powerful ram bow, and many light guns to rake the enemy deck in the forward charge to break the line of enemy battleships. Truly Nelsonian in intent!
I kind of like the French pre-dreadnaught aesthetic, I can imagine it cruising the canals of Mars, her difference engines whirring to calculate firing solutions against the spiders...
In the final photograph we can see how fore sighted the French Naval Designers were. All of the choice rooms above the waterline, a nice walking path around the berthing block, and a nice spacious sunning area on the fan tail. All that was needed was a lighted marquee on top and you have a ready made casino. Since it was not ashore, all nationalities could have used it. And you infer our French brothers don't make long term plans...🎰
This must be the ugliest ship I have ever seen. Though I wouldn't be suprised to find out that there is in fact an even uglier one, that so far just hasn't yet assaulted my sense of aesthetics, lurking somewhere...
Magazines and supplying 7 differenent calliber batteries on a single ship much have been a nightmare. Both logisitically and within the ship in action.
I kinda like those weird and often even weirder floating contraptions with loads and loads of guns put into all the possible and even impossible places aboard. They may have been an unstable, impracticable mess, worsened by design changes during completion, but they still exuded pride and power during a time when everything seemed to be possible and nearly every new or different idea or design was happily embraced to bring their respective nation ahead of the others. The only real clash of pre-dreadnought battle ships was Tsushima where the participating vessels were more modern by a few years, so those just slightly older, questionable designs never weren´t really tested in battle, therefore only few knew what might work and what most likely wouldn´t.
Honestly, it looks a little like someone started building an overgrown armored u-boot but the order was changed to a battleship so they stuck a hotel and some guns on top. The most striking thing is that it doesn't go for a deck anywhere near the waterline; if it had that but also the hotel superstructure it wouldn't look so goofy. Presumably it would take on less water at speed or in high sea states? At the same time it looks like someone tried to build a steel ship-of-the-line, realized at the last minute that guns go on turrets instead of gunports these days, then hurriedly added some turrets but left the gunports. Are those window-looking things gunports? What are they accomplishing?
Dakka dakka dakka (en français) Which, as it turns out, is 'Atak atak atak', which is pronounced identically when bellowed loud and fast ("orky") enough.
For a country that prides itself on its panache it sort of took a nose dive with ship designs around this period. Something which stuck me was the similarity here with the ship token from the game Monopoly, Maybe the next ship to be designed was an aircraft carrier based on the Top Hat. Maybe for the Russian Navy and based on the Russian circular hull design.
I think it looks good and has a lot of character. Just picture a Frenchman leaning out of each of those windows hurling devastating insults at the enemy.
While the French certainly had some eclectic names for their warships, Magenta was named after a French/Piedmont victory over the Austrians in 1859 while Napoleon III was supporting the cause of Italian unification and independence. Interestingly, if Wikipedia is to be believed the color magenta is also named after that battle.
How about reviewing the Frenh battleship Hoche? There's something about these old French ships that fascinate me. There's so little info on these late 1800's ship's.
"Monolythic Hotel Block"? Try "Tenement District". There are run-down tenement neighborhoods in Baltimore that bear a striking familiarity to that superstructure.
Great video as always. It seems her design was emblematic of the French war strategy at the time: optimism over reality. Also, it is a shame she wasn’t sacrificed in the attempt to force the Dardanelles, which would have been a much more worthier expenditure of obsolete forces rather than the catastrophic events that followed in Gallipoli.
I almost need a drink of something stiff before I can look at French pre-dreadnoughts for more than a few seconds. It's hard to imagine that the same country that produced Richelieu also produced these monstrosities.
@@WHix-om4yo And by the time they got it right, the whole BB concept was obsolete and they ended up wasting money on well-designed but utterly pointless battleships. Though to be fair, everyone else also wasted money on battleships just before/during WWII. Some historians have suggested that the 1930s buildup of French naval units, especially the two capital ship classes, was a far bigger waste of money than the Maginot Line, and one of the worst examples of misallocated resources in WWII.
I finally figured out why the French ships remind me so much of the current United States navey. Money is being spent because it is budgeted, it may or may not accomplish its intended purpose.
so we've covered primary and secondary; some ships having tertiary, a few quaternary, this one both quinary and senary; but do you know of any ships with septenary, octonary, nonary, or denary batteries?
Thanks Drach, that was weird. Good work, as always. However, I've never seen anything uglier except for maybe the underside of a horseshoe crab. Yet, taste is subjective. Many Thanks.
If you squint you'll see my grandmothers china hutch. I wonder what would be found with an exacting look into corruption of the French and Russian navies circa. 1890/1920
What purpose did the various holes in the superstructure serve? It seems like a ridiculous thing to have on any warship, it looks as if a late ironclad had swallowed a third rate and certainly does not help armouring one's armoured ship.
If you mean the square openings, those are scuttles, also known as portholes. They're basically windows, to let in light and fresh air. Pre-WW2 ships of all nations were covered with them.
To be fair, there were plenty of useless/pointless capital ships including those that were obsolete on launch (all the WWII-era battleships come to mind). But none of those others were anywhere near as terribly designed as this thing, so this ship still takes the cake.
Drach, did you see that Navy reviewer was active again? He just posted a bunch of videos on Japanese Destroyer classes in all their Pythonesque glory. Maybe now that he's back you guys could collaborate on something. Nudge, nudge, grin, grin, wink, wink, say no more.😀
These ships are so delightfully weird. I mean who designs a battleship to look like a barracks ship and then not use it as one later on. I mean they already had it ready to go from day one.
3:16 No need for camo paint schemes we shall disguise ourselves as the worlds largest floating mobile laundry! No one shall suspect we are a fighting ship and if that fails we shall pretend to be a breakwater we should be pretty good at that !
The US military had a habit of adopting French military ideas. I'm very glad we didn't do that when the US navy started building battleships. Not that we didn't have some odd designs, but nothing like that.
Pinned post for Q&A :)
Many japanese cruisers were fairly succesful in World War 2 but which one accomplished the most? Haguro who fought in 9 battles or Chokai which was the flagship at the battle of Savo Island in which four allied heavy cruisers were sunk?
Since a remake of the Film "Midway" is due this Fall. What are your top 10 Naval films? Trailer for the reboot ua-cam.com/video/Q-OhjLLhztg/v-deo.html
WARNING FOR MINORS!
Now, that said, does anyone have a photo about this ship-like thing on a gunnery practice? Even CGI?
To a layman like me, the drawbacks of the tumblehome design apear to be quite obvious.
Actually, how bad was the design both in terms of stability as well as reduced internal volume relative to surface area?
And what was the reasoning of ship desginers who choose this design?
Were they ignorant or indifferent of the issues, or - as I assume - simply thought that the sacrifice was worth it?
What had a great impact on naval abilities the introduction of the triple expansion engines or turbines.
I have a book on battleships where the entry for the Massena has a picture of a Japanese cruiser. I'd always assumed this was a mistake. Now, I wonder if it was to spare readers the horror...
Is it the amber guide to warships? As in the 300 greatest warships?
Tbh i love how it looks, looks like some sifi airship
French Naval Gun Designer: The navy is asking us to produce more guns. What caliber should we make our new weapons?
His team: (starts up the lottery ball machine) Dunno. Let's find out.
All the calibres, all the guns!
French Naval Designers: "What guns should we use in these new designs?"
French Navy: "Oui..."
*yes*
@@Rammstein0963.
French Naval Designers: How do the Americans do it?
*Breathless voice*....ALL the dakka..."
When Hotels go to war 2: Frenchie boogaloo
As a warship she was terrible but as a hotel she was in the Michelin Guide with two stars.
So the Yamato took inspiration on the Frenchs.
Pouting Yamato - "I'm NOT a hotel!" 😣
At least Yamato worked, even if she was pointless. This monstrosity is not only pointless but doesn't even work.
As a gastronomic Nation building Hotels is normal for France.
So everything they build looks like a Hotel !
You're forgetting that when the French dropped the Jeune École strategy, they replaced it with stratégie de Baldrick, a plan as cunning as a fox, who's just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford university, to defeat the Royal Navy by showing up in such outrageous ships, half the RN laugh themselves to death, and those that survive will insist on fighting blindfold so they can no longer see the French ships.
Mechanical stealth, gouging the M1 retina.
🤣...😮🤔
“So, french naval designer, what is the calibre of our main battery?”
“30 D20”
“what”
*rolls 30 D20 dice like a power gamer in D and D*
“That many millimetres”
“and the secondaries”
*brings out more dice*
Brings out a bucket of different dice, throwss them onto the floor and writes outcome of each one under "Non-primary armament".
To be fair the rate of progress in gun and armour technology in that era was astounding. You could pick a gun at the start of ship design and it could be obsolete before the ship entered service, in turn rendering the ship worthless prior to completion. The British correctly concluded that the simplification of ammo and guns would benefit their large global fleet more than regular gun switches, and as a result tried to innovate and maximize the potential of each gun chosen by improving the ammo/propellant. This worked well enough. But. Most other navies tried to grab the cutting edge of technology and had ship after ship with unique guns.
Your attacks are made at disadvantage, but your rest is at advantage.
Looks like someone tried to build a ship on top of an overturned ship.
Ditto. Except my initial thought was low income apartment block on an upturned hull. !
What gun calibers do you want?
All of them.
I imagine a broadside would make quite the interesting noise.
Which hits are from what guns? Meh...
@@brianreddeman951 Would hope they could tell the difference between the 12" and 37mm splashes. Then again maybe not.
@@spikespa5208 To be fair with the amount of guns she and Charles Martell had i dont really think it matters all that much
Or: 'yes' (oui).
Thing of beauty. Wow. Did every square foot have a separate designer?
Kind of? This monstrosity was literally designed by commitee
It’s French... square meters
Such a beautiful ship,made with purely function in mind, it looks like it could seamlessly cut throught the waves. The aerodynamic design is so sexy even scharnhorst doesn't compare.
Perfection indeed
Imagine if that hull-style had actually worked, and we all thought that was how battleships were supposed to look
Thanks a lot, William. Now I have that nightmarish immage of two fleets of these abominations fighting each other in my head...
Cheers.
@@Bird_Dog00 soooo triream hull. Guns odlf what ever calabor you feel like.
Ooo the French
My eyes!
@@Bird_Dog00 Just imagine them all sinking after the battle. There were no survivors!
OMG!
As someone currently writing a steampunk novel about flying battleships, I have to say the massena would look way cooler if it flew
Grifter that would at least explain the hull form. All of the antigravity machinery has to go somewhere...
Definitely Steampunk.
Most steam punk of all navies, even their later stuff was extremely unusual. The Fantastique class, newer steam punk. French Art Nouveau and Art Deco styling to the max.
how about the austrian-hungarian pre dreadnought Zrinyi?
My grandfather was in the US Navy and was on this ship as a capture crew member for about a year.
he was originally on a sub chaser out of Groton,Cn.
I even have a post card(austrian origin)that he sent home where he tells about the ship. post card was inside an envelope. quite an interesting post war history.
Drach has already done a video on the Radetzky class. Given the relative lack of adventures that the Austro-Hungarian capital ships got up to, I'm not sure he'd ever do a specific video about just Zrinyi. Cool to hear that about your grandfather, I always wondered what it was like for the US sailors who got to crew her in her last years. Her old crew must have been much happier giving her over to the Americans rather than the Italians.
Krešouts almost certainly on the list
@@kreol1q1q in Italy the ship would have served as a Mafia-drug-transport-vehicle, in US hands as usual obviously as a whorehouse.
jeffrey mcfadden can you type out what he wrote?
@@connormclernon26 feb. 3, 1919.
dear friends,
here she is former austrian-hungarian battleship zrinyi. the next nation to own her is to be decided by peace conference. she has 4, 13 inch guns. 8, 10 inch guns. 16, 4 inch guns. also torpedo tubes. she was built about 10 years ago. she burns crude oil and coal. goodnight
Boice.
(Boice was driving a truck in the mountains of western Pa. in may 1934 when the truck lost it's brakes. he died a few days later leaving a wife and 5 kids. during the height of the depression. his widow never remarried. Boice was my grandfather)
Boices' G G G grandfather was John McFadden, a veteran of the revolution, battle of upper sandusky ohio 1782.
Despite whatever issues they may have, I love the look of French warships of the era.
So do I. Every single one of them appears to be the artifact of a naval architect's 19th and 20th century mind.
I can't help but wonder if the ugliness of the ship was a planned defence mechanism that would cause enemy sailors eyes to bleed every time they looked at it.
I was thinking the other way, maybe the ship´s ugliness was designed so someone would start a shooting war attempting to sink it asap...
This is one ship among many that I really wish we had in World of Warships! I am hoping that this game advances and there are more pre dreadknots. Ships like this absolutely deserve to be played!
A ship who's most notable accomplishments were:
Sinking to stop some waves
And
Shooting itself.
Ugh
Blessed are the countries with boring histories. Same goes for ships.
It didn't shoot itself. It shot something else and because it was close, a shell splinter damaged it. May more ships have uneventful lifespans like this, it means less wars and fighting happening.
@@Shenaldrac I think I prefer the way I worded it 🤔
But your not wrong
"A *senary* battery" Wow there goes the only redeeming feature of this abomination.
Ah, Drach waxing poetically about the design of the Massena. Best part of my week so far. sm
This seems like the inspiration for the Warhammer 40k designs.
It would absolutely blend in completely naturally in an Imperium Navy fleet.
I like French pre-dreadnoughts! There! I said it and I am proud of it!
So ugly they're cool. I gotta admit I like weird. Made for a nice breakwater. Too bad the Ottoman Empire couldn't have salvaged it as a cheap seaside hotel.
And i prefer The Onion for my national news.
Admittedly I like the very strange designs. But that might be the German in me. It's a nice break from our excruciating efficiency. Certainly line of our pre dreadnoughts against the line of theirs would have been a most interesting sight.
You can have your pride but we’re taking your eyeballs as you are clearly not using them.
French Pre-Dreadnoughts: The Nickleback of things that float.
Il be extremely kind and say this think looks very steam punk
Well it does, just not in a "designed to look cool while never actually working" way because it was meant to actually do stuff in the real world.
Yes, that will justify it. Steampunk.
I shall be extremely _unkind_ and say 'it looks very steampunk'.
I'll be very direct and say it looks like it is what *spawned* steampunk.
Kill it with fire.
@@benbaselet2026 But that's how it ended up anyway. Steampunk is the visual language of impractical mechanics.
Compare to contemporary Majestic-class. Much tamer looks, much better ship.
It's a beautiful ship! Definitive proof that steampunk was invented by le Marine Nationale Française
I love the design of the massena
I love the look of the Massena. But I also love the look of those Multi Turreted Interwar Tanks.
Drach, old boy, you must appreciate that these ships are works of art! They are absolutely wonderfully steampunk krazy. If there was just one left on display I guarantee that the turnstile turnover would more than compensate the cost of storage.
I dream of having this era ships (1870-1885) in my World of Warships virtual port. These naval times were so classy and damn rich in various ideas!
That'd be great! That being said, what I would love more than anything would be an open world WoWs. Imagine running around the Falkland islands in your Scharnhorst running into British battlecruisers. No more of that children's toy 12 v 12 battles.
@@X8X8X8X8X8X8X8X8X8X exactly, good vision indeed. Fingers crossed.
@@ryszardkoprowski1414
I fear we will never get anything like it, however. It may appeal to us "hardcore" people but not to the general public.
Wouldn't you love to see a period fantasy movie featuring cgi French pre-dreadnoughts against alien space ships
I love your work sir. Can you look into the HMS Canopus and maybe the battle of the Falkland Islands 1914? And keep up the amazing work!
How can you not love it, this wonderful hybrid of a French BD comic design and a Manga as an illustration of Jules Verne or Michael Moorcock based steampunk story.
And it even swims, is this not amazing.
This is "The Homer" of battleships. Awesome.
What does this monstrosity cost?!?!?!?
Love the tumblehome hull form and the cut down bow. Almost looks like a ram bow, but it was probably there to reduce blast damage from the forward gun.
I, for one, think these beasts are beautiful, and far more interesting to look at then another standardized design.
But they don't work. Seriously the number of design flaws on these things are horrifying.
Using this hot mess as a breakwater was brilliant! Probably the most useful thing ever done with the ugly sucker! "Avert your eyes!" is right, man! They should have called the thing Medusa!
Good Lord, she's a "Steampunk" enthusiast's fever dream; no wonder you had to be blind-folded for this vid.
I love the look of this ship, it may not be to most nautical taste, but there is something about these French ships. This is probably the final iteration of ( Fierce Face ) in French tactical doctrine with three heavy guns brought to forward bearings, powerful ram bow, and many light guns to rake the enemy deck in the forward charge to break the line of enemy battleships. Truly Nelsonian in intent!
I kind of like the French pre-dreadnaught aesthetic, I can imagine it cruising the canals of Mars, her difference engines whirring to calculate firing solutions against the spiders...
I suppose the idea for all the windows is to enable easy evacuation when the thing sinks like a rock.
Brutal...
I foresee a competition to build a mixed class of Pre dreadnought French Battleships ....... Drach will love that.
The giant anchor is genius: drop it, and it´ll gash the hull!
In the final photograph we can see how fore sighted the French Naval Designers were. All of the choice rooms above the waterline, a nice walking path around the berthing block, and a nice spacious sunning area on the fan tail. All that was needed was a lighted marquee on top and you have a ready made casino. Since it was not ashore, all nationalities could have used it. And you infer our French brothers don't make long term plans...🎰
The designers of this ship sure loved their absinthe.
“our ship needs more armament. What size guns should we include?” ... “ALL OF THEM.”
Captain Nemo seal of approval
Drach and coffee.... excellent morning 🌞
This must be the ugliest ship I have ever seen.
Though I wouldn't be suprised to find out that there is in fact an even uglier one, that so far just hasn't yet assaulted my sense of aesthetics, lurking somewhere...
Bird_Dog You hit the spot with your comment, that makes two of us ...
@Bird_Dog you should look for the Hoche then :p she's POWERFUL Ugly!
It's more than ugly, it's... weird... it looks like it was designed by Games Workshop.
@Steven Cross
Yikes. Looks like a floating dock had sex with a bucket-wheel excavator...
But you have seen it.
Gentlemen, you'll remember this day as the day you *almost* sunk MN Massena.
Magazines and supplying 7 differenent calliber batteries on a single ship much have been a nightmare. Both logisitically and within the ship in action.
The ship wpuld probably capsize before that ever became a problem.
I kinda like those weird and often even weirder floating contraptions with loads and loads of guns put into all the possible and even impossible places aboard. They may have been an unstable, impracticable mess, worsened by design changes during completion, but they still exuded pride and power during a time when everything seemed to be possible and nearly every new or different idea or design was happily embraced to bring their respective nation ahead of the others.
The only real clash of pre-dreadnought battle ships was Tsushima where the participating vessels were more modern by a few years, so those just slightly older, questionable designs never weren´t really tested in battle, therefore only few knew what might work and what most likely wouldn´t.
How dare you assault my eyes with such a hideous ship. You shall be hearing from my lawyer shortly.
Honestly, it looks a little like someone started building an overgrown armored u-boot but the order was changed to a battleship so they stuck a hotel and some guns on top. The most striking thing is that it doesn't go for a deck anywhere near the waterline; if it had that but also the hotel superstructure it wouldn't look so goofy. Presumably it would take on less water at speed or in high sea states?
At the same time it looks like someone tried to build a steel ship-of-the-line, realized at the last minute that guns go on turrets instead of gunports these days, then hurriedly added some turrets but left the gunports.
Are those window-looking things gunports? What are they accomplishing?
Where is the pool located?
Dakka dakka dakka (en français)
Which, as it turns out, is 'Atak atak atak', which is pronounced identically when bellowed loud and fast ("orky") enough.
For a country that prides itself on its panache it sort of took a nose dive with ship designs around this period.
Something which stuck me was the similarity here with the ship token from the game Monopoly, Maybe the next ship to be designed was an aircraft carrier based on the Top Hat. Maybe for the Russian Navy and based on the Russian circular hull design.
That ship is just buttugly
The aforementioned building designer was also on the new fangled french stuff called 'wine' I still prefer my cold tea thank you very much
I think it looks good and has a lot of character. Just picture a Frenchman leaning out of each of those windows hurling devastating insults at the enemy.
Well at least we know the Pompidou centre floats!
ah, the history of yet another proud and gloriou... oh wait.
Thank you! Like a circus freak I’ve never been able to take my eyes off this thing. What were they thinking!
Windows on a battleship! You got to love the French.
It's early, so I misread the title as MN Margarita... This thing looks like something you'd get after drinking too many of them.
Good one. It does look like a ship you'd see in a dream, then wake up and realize it was just a nightmare.
Not margaritas. Liters and liters of purest absinthe.
While the French certainly had some eclectic names for their warships, Magenta was named after a French/Piedmont victory over the Austrians in 1859 while Napoleon III was supporting the cause of Italian unification and independence. Interestingly, if Wikipedia is to be believed the color magenta is also named after that battle.
How about reviewing the Frenh battleship Hoche? There's something about these old French ships that fascinate me. There's so little info on these late 1800's ship's.
Last time I was this early the British and German empires were still in a naval arms race.
I was still just a deckhand on the Ark.
"Monolythic Hotel Block"? Try "Tenement District". There are run-down tenement neighborhoods in Baltimore that bear a striking familiarity to that superstructure.
That looks like a prop from a horror movie.
YESSS the Massena! Drach I dont know why you look down on these beautiful and useless things. Pre Dreadnaughts deserve more love.
Amazing Jules Verne style battle starship. Can aswell strike your tri-colors in style!
It looks like the built a ship piggybacked on top of a subs hull.
Almost American in its gunnery compliment. Although an American ship probably would be more concentrated in as many guns but fewer different calibers.
That anchor is an absolute unit.
Great video as always. It seems her design was emblematic of the French war strategy at the time: optimism over reality. Also, it is a shame she wasn’t sacrificed in the attempt to force the Dardanelles, which would have been a much more worthier expenditure of obsolete forces rather than the catastrophic events that followed in Gallipoli.
I unironically think this ship is beautiful
See a psychologist
I almost need a drink of something stiff before I can look at French pre-dreadnoughts for more than a few seconds. It's hard to imagine that the same country that produced Richelieu also produced these monstrosities.
Yeah, a pretty brutal (and expensive) learning curve.
@@WHix-om4yo And by the time they got it right, the whole BB concept was obsolete and they ended up wasting money on well-designed but utterly pointless battleships. Though to be fair, everyone else also wasted money on battleships just before/during WWII.
Some historians have suggested that the 1930s buildup of French naval units, especially the two capital ship classes, was a far bigger waste of money than the Maginot Line, and one of the worst examples of misallocated resources in WWII.
I finally figured out why the French ships remind me so much of the current United States navey. Money is being spent because it is budgeted, it may or may not accomplish its intended purpose.
I absolutely love early French ship designs!
it looks like the reason why Absinthe was outlawed?
Yay! I like learning about the MN ships.
so we've covered primary and secondary; some ships having tertiary, a few quaternary, this one both quinary and senary; but do you know of any ships with septenary, octonary, nonary, or denary batteries?
how about duodenary? or even vigenary??
@@teddyboragina6437 Don't forget the fellow on the bow with a slingshot. And I've lost count.
Look at the size of those intake funnels...And check out that anchor... I guess that's what those crane arms are for.
That is one evil-looking vessel!
Thanks Drach, that was weird. Good work, as always. However, I've never seen anything uglier except for maybe the underside of a horseshoe crab. Yet, taste is subjective. Many Thanks.
Who needs "steampunk" when u see something like this...
Designer: So should we go for 138, 100, 47 or 37mm guns as tertiary armement?
Marine Nationale: yes...
I assume the design was a defensive feature to make the ship so unappealing that the enemy would be reluctant to fire at it. Thanks for the video.
RAN scrap iron flotilla pls
The look of this ship makes me want to carve out my eyes with a rusty spoon!
What an awesome Minmatar hull
If you squint you'll see my grandmothers china hutch.
I wonder what would be found with an exacting look into corruption of the French and Russian navies circa. 1890/1920
And the Imperial Chinese Navy
@@bkjeong4302 oh ya i see that now ..
What purpose did the various holes in the superstructure serve? It seems like a ridiculous thing to have on any warship, it looks as if a late ironclad had swallowed a third rate and certainly does not help armouring one's armoured ship.
@keith moore LOL!
But why would that very ship need so many vents, it seems a bit excessive at best.
@@X8X8X8X8X8X8X8X8X8X This is the pre Air Conditioning era. They to breathe fresh air.
@@WALTERBROADDUS
But why did no other ship of the same era have anywhere near the same amount of vents?
@@WALTERBROADDUS the British seem to have gone without them?
If you mean the square openings, those are scuttles, also known as portholes. They're basically windows, to let in light and fresh air. Pre-WW2 ships of all nations were covered with them.
I would like to see a video about Finnish WW2 coastal ships, Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen.
Wow. When a capital ship's best use for her country is to be sunk. Just... wow.
To be fair, there were plenty of useless/pointless capital ships including those that were obsolete on launch (all the WWII-era battleships come to mind). But none of those others were anywhere near as terribly designed as this thing, so this ship still takes the cake.
Drach, did you see that Navy reviewer was active again? He just posted a bunch of videos on Japanese Destroyer classes in all their Pythonesque glory. Maybe now that he's back you guys could collaborate on something. Nudge, nudge, grin, grin, wink, wink, say no more.😀
This is the first time I wasn't sad that the video ended with scrap/sunk/scuttled ship.
This abomination should have been scrapped even before hitting water.
These ships are so delightfully weird. I mean who designs a battleship to look like a barracks ship and then not use it as one later on. I mean they already had it ready to go from day one.
The Crimson Permanent Assurance
I quite like how it looks. It's interesting in an ugly sort of way.
like the 80s A-team were surrounded by enemies... at a historic naval dockyard.... this is what would roll out when the music played...
When you build a ship off of a 3 year old's crayon drawing of a battleship.
3:16 No need for camo paint schemes we shall disguise ourselves as the worlds largest floating mobile laundry! No one shall suspect we are a fighting ship and if that fails we shall pretend to be a breakwater we should be pretty good at that !
Ah yes, the MN Bloc de Appartement finally sails.
The US military had a habit of adopting French military ideas. I'm very glad we didn't do that when the US navy started building battleships. Not that we didn't have some odd designs, but nothing like that.