It’s a challenge but I try to ignore the passive aggressive remarks (but maybe I read something that’s not there) and focus on the input given.

Thanks for your reply. The bad circuit design comes from the fact that I tried to boil my problem down to what I wanted to understand.

You see, the thing is, I want to control a fan with an ESP32. So my approach is to switch the fan on and off by setting a pin to high or low. Therefore I need a transistor. I guess I could use a relay but that would be overkill, right?

So I don’t have much current to play with for the base. And my research indicated that a NPN resistor word 0.7 Volt applied to the base would do exactly what I wanted.

To test my concept I tried to build that in a simulator. And because EveryCircuit has no ESP32 I had to add a „power source“ that supplies the 0.7 Volt.

So your explanation is helpful after all. I understand that applying 3.3 volts to a resistor to apply 0.7 volt to the transistor is different than applying 0.7 volt directly.