2020 Tuscan GP Free Practice 1 and 2 Debrief

Words by UnmeshDatta26, showstopperNL, and Death_Pig

• Free Practice 1 Results
• Free Practice 2 Results
• FIA Documents for the Italian GP

Discussion Threads:

• Free Practice 1 Discussion Thread
• Free Practice 2 Discussion Thread

The Worst Kept Secret Of The Year Is Confirmed

Vettel to Aston Martin, Perez goes where?

Since Ferrari announced that they would be signing Carlos Sainz for the 2021 season to partner with Charles Leclerc, the future of Sebastian Vettel has been in limbo, with murmurs that he was even considering retirement. The biggest rumor all season was that he would join soon-to-be-renamed Racing Point, spearheading the Aston Martin rebrand.
The rumors are now confirmed. Following Sergio Perez announcement that he would leave the team after 7 years of service, Vettel is now officially signed with Racing Point/Aston Martin and while the contract’s length has not yet confirmed, reports indicated that he will take a pay cut, supposedly earning a third his current salary at Ferrari. According to Otmar Szafnauer, Racing Point’s CEO and Team Principal, it certainly seems that Vettel will be given a steady hand and a steady team for him to settle in and fight.
We would be remiss if we did not mention Sergio Perez’ contributions to Racing Point’s current standing. When the Force India team was in danger of collapsing, Perez’s actions bought it enough time to finalise a sale to the group headed by Lawrence Stroll, saving the team (along with many jobs). The outpouring of support and gratitude for his efforts by team personnel are certainly enhanced by the knowledge that the team would likely not be in Formula 1 without Perez.
Although many people say there is no place for sentimentality in the cut-throat business of F1, the humane connections formed while battling the other drivers and teams run deep and it is clear that Sergio Perez was a beloved part of the team and will be missed by many.

Change of Scenery at Williams

After Claire and Sir Frank left Williams last weekend in an emotional goodbye from the paddock at Monza and CEO Mike O’Driscoll announced he would be leaving the team, the questions started swirling around for who would come in to replace them.
For now, Simon Roberts has been promoted to Acting Team Principal and will lead Williams until the new owners can decide on the changes they want to implement. Roberts began his career in F1 in 2003, joining McLaren to be their Operations Director and General Manager, later moving to Force India in 2009 as their COO before a return to McLaren in 2010 as an Operations Director and a part of the Executive Team. He would become McLaren’s COO in 2017, a post he occupied until May, when he became Williams’ Managing Director.
We all hope he can steer the team through this difficult period towards a brighter future.

Quick bits

• Ferrari celebrates their 1000th GP in F1 with a new special burgundy livery, the same color as their first-ever car that raced in Monaco in 1950. Their driver suits have also changed to the same color with a large 1000 logo on it, also present on the cars engine covers. Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc are racing with special helmets to honor the occasion.
  
• Haas and Racing Point have settled a two-year dispute over payment of F1’s prize money. Haas had originally argued that Stroll’s Racing Point should not receive their Column 1 prize money for two years, as they were a new entry, as Haas did when it entered the sport in 2016. As this was not the case, Racing Point receiving Column 1 prize money normally, Haas brought a case against it, saying that either Racing Point should not have been paid or Haas should have received the same payments for their first 2 years.
  

Haas had launched the protest against Racing Point at the end of the 2018 season in Abu Dhabi. Today, it was announced that the two teams had reached a settlement, details still very hard to come by.
In a press conference by Szafnauer and Haas Team Principal Guenther Steiner, Szafnauer said: “We’re pleased that it’s come to a conclusion and now the entire team can focus on what we’re here to do and entertain the fans, we’re happy it’s behind us”, which close the matter without providing any details.

Track and Tech Talk

Mugello is the first of several new tracks for Formula 1 in 2020, and this weekend will be the first time a Grand Prix will be held at the track, but not the first time Formula 1 cars have gone around it.
The track record was set by Rubens Barrichello in the F2004 and half the current drivers have taken part in races at Mugello (a list of which will appear as a comment to this Debrief), with 6 current drivers having also taken part in the 2012 Pirelli test at the track.
Set in the Tuscan Mountains, the surrounding area has some similarities to the Red Bull Ring, with Mugello being a very fast track, featuring blind corners due to the terrain’s undulation, with Turns 8 and 9 (Arrabbiata 1 and 2) probably being the most impressive part for Formula 1 cars, as they are expected to take the double right-hander flat out, subjecting the drivers to massive G forces.
According to Mercedes’ fact sheet, 66% of the lap time is spent at full throttle, and the lowest speed corners are somewhere near 120 kph, much faster than most other circuits on the calendar. The drivers can expect to take anywhere between 4 and 5 Gs of force at Turn 9. Valtteri Bottas was quoted after FP2 saying “this track is definitely one of the most physically demanding. We’ll only properly get to see the effects of that in the race distance, but even today, I could feel it and it’s going to be tough for everyone on Sunday”.
There is only one DRS zone on the start-finish straight, with the detection point being just before the final turn, with only 5 braking events in the whole circuit, despite there being 15 turns, 6 to the left and 9 to the right. This track is a true test of the power and grip of the modern era cars, with drivers expected to take some corners flat out, notably the aforementioned Arrabbiata corners.
Pirelli has brought the three hardest compounds (C1, C2, and C3) for this weekend. The asphalt at Mugello is famously abrasive, so Pirelli expects high degradation from the asphalt and from the loads the high-speed corners will impose on the tires. As the cars will run high downforce packages, the loads will increase, and we can expect a powerful DRS in the start/finish straight.
And for the first time this season, there will be fans in the grandstands, as Mugello will allow close to 3.000 fans to watch the race live, bringing a small dose of normalcy to a very strange 2020.

Free Practice 1

After weeks of anticipation, it was finally time for the cars to hit the track at Mugello. All teams went out to do their installation laps right away, using tires they would return to Pirelli midway through the session for analysis. Lando Norris tested his radio in the most Lando Norris way possible by singing. Happy Friday everyone!
A cautious session ensued, with Mercedes coming out on top, Bottas topping the first-ever official Formula 1 session at Mugello, Barrichello’s track record duly broken. The Finn was closely followed by Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, the Red Bull looking good this weekend, in contrast to their tough weekend at Monza. The nature of Mugello with fast sweeping corners should favor Red Bull’s aerodynamic dominant design, and we expect the team to take the fight to Mercedes.
A fairly big surprise on the FP1 time sheet is Charles Leclerc closing the session in P3. Time will tell if this was a single lap glory run, or a glimpse of actual pace this weekend, but things can only improve from last weekend.
As usual, 6-time world champion Lewis Hamilton was not far from the top, even if he “only” managed to clock the 4th fastest time, some 0.5 seconds back from his Mercedes teammate.
Last week’s winner Pierre Gasly impressed again, finishing 5th. Just like big brother Red Bull, AlphaTauri looked good around Mugello in FP1, with Gasly’s teammate Daniil Kvyat setting the 7th best time.
After a torrid weekend in Monza, as can be read in u/Death_Pig’s A Weekend Chez Renault piece, Esteban Ocon will be looking to bounce back at Mugello. The weekend certainly got off to a good start as he was 6th fastest in FP1, 0.3s quicker than his teammate Daniel Ricciardo, who finished in 10th.
Sandwiched by the Renaults were McLaren’s Norris in 8th and Red Bull’s Alexander Albon. While completing the most laps in the session (34), the second Red Bull had a slow start to the weekend, ending FP1 a full second behind Verstappen.
Further down the leaderboard, the biggest surprise is Racing Point down in 18th and 19th. The two pink cars appeared out of sync with the rest of the teams in doing race simulations, even causing some slight frustration between Stroll and Verstappen.
Other than Carlos Sainz being down in P15 for McLaren, the back of the grid had the usual suspects, with Giovinazzi P14, Russell P16, Magnussen P17, and Latifi P20.
The only incident of note in the morning session was Nicholas Latifi spinning into the gravel trap, but able to get going again.
FP1 did not answer many questions, but highlighted that the tires will be a big topic this weekend. The track does indeed punish the rubber quite severely and the teams will have their work cut out for them making them last.
With the teams having only three practice sessions to acquire all their tire usage data, this could throw a wrench in whatever plans the teams have made so far.

Free Practice 2

A fairly standard FP1 was followed up by an incident packed FP2, with Albon starting the session going back to the future.
The first to kick the excitement off was Leclerc, who spun into the gravel and was lucky not to beach his car, in a similar incident to Latifi’s in FP1.
After starting the morning on a high note, Lando Norris will have few reasons to sing after FP2. The young Brit put a wheel on the gravel coming out of Turn 10 and was lucky to only lose a front wing, and as the McLaren could not return to the pits, his session ended.
The red flag came out and the timing of it was awkward, as teams were preparing and/or starting their race simulations and had to abort their plans.
After the damaged McLaren was out of the way, the session restarted and the teams started their qualifying simulations, setting their best laps of the session. Bottas led the way again, going into the 1:16s for the first time, the current lap record now 1:16.969s. Hamilton was 0.2s behind and Verstappen almost matching the #44 Black Arrow’s time, only 0.039s behind.
Just as teams were settling into race simulations again, the 2nd big incident of the session occurred. Kimi Räikkönen and Sergio Perez collided in a very weird accident coming out of the pit exit into Turn 1. You don’t typically see collisions like this in free practice, but as the Racing Point came out of the pits, Perez could not see the Alfa Romeo, and as Räikkönen turned into the first corner, he clipped the front wing of pink car, spinning into the gravel, while Perez had to return to the pits for repairs (and will have a 1 place grid penalty for it). As the clash left a scattering of debris on track, the red flag came out again, ending many long runs.
The second session was less kind to Ferrari, with Leclerc P10 and Vettel P12 after a perfectly executed pirouette midway through the session. Racing Point fared better, but P7 (Perez) and 11 (Stroll) is not where the team wants to be, so it remains to be seen if they can further improve on Saturday. As Mugello will probably not offer many overtaking opportunities, a poor qualifying can hinder a team’s fortunes on Sunday.
Haas looks particularly in danger, as Grosjean could only complete 5 laps and Kevin Magnussen, while notching 32 laps was unable to beat Williams' Latifi, the teammates occupying P19 and 20, respectively. Kvyat, who closed the session in P15, must also improve, especially as his race winning teammate was P8 in the session.
With 12 minutes to go the mess was cleared, and cars took to the track again, before Vettel’s Ferrari decided to end their session earlier. The car turned itself off and ended the day’s running.

Conclusions after FP2:

Due to the long runs getting cut short, it is hard to ascertain where teams stand in terms of pace, but Red Bull does appear to be more competitive this weekend. Verstappen’s tire management could be an important part of the race, but it is yet unclear where Mercedes stands. This is not to suggest that they will not be the strongest team on Sunday, as betting against the team in 2020 seems foolish, but we can hope that Red Bull will challenge, especially if the temperature should rise.
The midfield battle still is as close as ever. With the new power mode directives in place, this could be another circuit where a midfield team, like McLaren, could challenge the top teams by pushing in a higher engine mode than the rest. On a track like Mugello, every ounce of power is crucial to overall lap times and the restricted overtaking opportunities could help a slightly slower car hold its position. After an all-midfield podium and an AlphaTauri win last weekend, we would certainly not complain if Sunday brought some surprises.

It's time for the result of our latest survey! And it had 7252 participant! So thank you everyone that took time to answer those questions.
You should be able to see the answer if you go there : https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1KfHOyWHQTyFEEeAYvCZRxBc3_ZGZxJn6ZUztiwMdVjE/edit

Community section :

What country are you from?

Country	U.S.A.	Germany	India	Australia	Canada	U.K.	Bazil	France	Spain	Sweden
Percentage	33.1 %	7.4%	5.4%	5%	4.8%	4.4%	3.1%	3.1%	2.1%	1.7%

Is nice to see that we have users from all around the world, even if nearly 50% are from English speaking countries.
Image 1.

How old are you?

The average age of a /OnePiece user is 23.62 years old. We have roughtly 10% of users that are underaged, and 10% that are 30 years old or more.
Image 2.

Gender

Gender	Male	Female	Other
Percentage	88.6%	8.9%	2.5%

There is no surprise there.
For the others, we have some Gender Fluids, transgenders, Bigenders, quite a lot of Non-binary, a Loli, a Furry, and nearly a 100 Oden (You wish), as well as some rude people, but I won't put up what they said.

Manga or Anime?

Both	Manga Only	Anime Only
49.8%	46.2%	4%

No real surprise here either. Considering the subreddit has a lot of spoilers and is focussed around the chapter release, it's obvious there are only a few Anime Only people here. So thank you for Sticking Around, even if it the best place to avoid spoilers.

For approximately how long have you been following One Piece?

1 Year or less	2 years	3 years	4 years	5 years	6 years	7 years	8 years	9 years	10 years or more
8.7%	6.2%	6.8%	6.1%	8.1%	7.1%	6.7%	7.1%	4.6%	38.5%

Nearly 40% of our users have followed the series for 10 years or more. (To give an idea, this mean they followed the series since Before the timeskip, as chapter 597 was released at the end of August 2010).
For the rest, we have roughly the same number of new readers that stays with the series. So it's quite good to bring new blood and not have a decrease of new readers.

Where does One Piece rank on your list of favorite manga?

N°1	Top 3	Top 5	Top 10	Bellow Top 10
70.1%	21.6%	5%	2.6%	0.6%

Well, you are in /OnePiece after all. So it's kinda obvious the manga is either your favorite or in your top 3.
If it isn't your number 1, what series are better than One Piece for you?

Do you own One Piece Merchandise?

No	Manga Volumes	Figurines	Clothes	Poster	DVD/Blu-ray
44.2%	33.1%	24.5%	18.4%	17.2%	6.3%

Those are some good numbers I would say, 55.8% of users have some merchandise and are probably supporting the series (depending on where you bought those)
For the OTHERS answers given, some good ones are : autograph from dub VA of brook, Alvida pre devilfruit bodypillow, Chopper teddy bear, Sountracks, Custom made and 3D printed Keychain, Databook.

Subreddit Section :

Do you visit OnePiece mostly on mobile or on desktop?

Mobile or Apps	Both	Desktop
50.6%	29.5%	19.9%

If you are using desktop, are you using the old version of reddit? Or the redesign?

Redesign	Old version
63.3%	36.7%

It seems like most users are using Mobile and Apps, as well as the redesign on desktop, so it's probably time to pay more attention to that than to the old version, this way we can get banners/flair for users that are on the new version of reddit.

How often do you make : a submission on OnePiece?/Comment?/read the rules?

Submission :

Never	Rarely	Sometimes	Often	Very often (Daily)
67.1%	24.7%	5.6%	1.6%	1%

Comments :

Never	Rarely	Sometimes	Often	Very often (Daily)
41.2%	32.7%	17.6%	6.7%	1.8%

Check the rules :

Never	Rarely	Sometimes	Often	Very often (Daily)
49.1%	17.1%	13.7%	8%	12%

This really shows that there are a lot of lurkers on the subreddit. Most of you won't ever post or comment on the subreddit. With 8% of users creating submission and 25% commenting.
As for the rules, there isn't any surprise since nearly every post respect the rules. (Only 1/5 of the post needs to be removed), so thank you to all of those that read them.

Content you enjoy the MOST/the LEAST.

Content you enjoy the most :

Theories/Discussion	Fanart	Polls	Cosplay	Merchandise	Youtube Video	Media (Photo and Video)
89.6%	47.9%	19.7%	16.7%	14.4%	14.1%	11.7%

So without surprise, people in this subreddit enjoy the Theories/discussions the most out of every type of post, it's then followed by the Fanarts.
Which is good since like 75% of posts made are Discussion (50% total)/Fanarts (25% total).
Content you enjoy the least:

Youtuber Video	Merchandise	Cosplay	Media	Fanart	Polls	Theories/Discussion
36.7%	35.1%	31%	15.7%	15.3%	6.9%	4.2%

Here there aren't any content that most users enjoy the least, but it still seems like users don't want to see that much Merchandise or Cosplay post. (Youtuber video are very rare)
Also, a quick reminder, Discussion/Theories are mostly found by sorting by New. This is where you will see all of them, as it's hard for them to show up on the front page of the subreddit (but if it shows up on Hot, then it's a very good one).

Do you only use the subreddit for the Spoiler and Chapter Discussion thread?

No	Yes
63.4%	36.6%

It's nice to see that roughly 2/3 of the users are here for more than just the Spoilers and Chapter discussion. But there is still a huge part that only use the subreddit for that.

Do you want the spoilers gone from this subreddit?

No	Yes
86.7%	13.3%

Rate your overall experience on OnePiece.

Here it's seems that out of 10, the Overall Experience on /OnePiece is 8.35
Image n°3

One Piece related questions :

Who is your favorite Straw Hat?

Luffy	Zoro	Nami	Usopp	Sanji	Chopper	Robin	Franky	Brook	Jinbe
34.8%	29.1%	1.3%	6%	10.1%	1.8%	6.5%	2.4%	5.4%	2.6%

Who is your least favorite Straw Hat?

Luffy	Zoro	Nami	Usopp	Sanji	Chopper	Robin	Franky	Brook	Jinbe
0.8%	3.3%	10.6%	15%	6.5%	21.3%	4%	19.2%	8.3%	11.1%

As it was expected, Luffy is the Favorite Straw Hat for a lot of peopel, he's also the Straw Hat with the fewest "Least Favorite". After him Zoro is second favorite, followed by Sanji, Robin, Usopp, Brook, with the other Straw Hat having very few votes (and Nami having the Least "Favorite" Straw Hat.)
After that, it seems like Chopper, Usopp, and Franky are the one people like the least out of the Straw Hat.
I know it was a hard question for some of you, but the result are still interesting to know.

Which Strawhat has the saddest backstory?

Robin	Brook	Sanji	Chopper	Nami	Other
50.9%	25%	9.3%	7.1%	5.8%	1.9%

The Straw Hats with the saddest backstory is Robin! Followed by Brook, then Sanji, Chopper and Nami.

What is your favorite Yonko crew?

Red Hair	Whitebeard	Big Mom	Beast	Blackbeard
34.7%	31.1%	14%	10.6%	9.5%

So the favorite Emperor's crew are the Red Hair Pirate! Which is very impressive since we haven't seen much of them. I guess Oda better delivers when it come to see them in action after Wano.

Who is your favorite Admiral?

Garp	Aokiji	Fujitora	Kirazu	Akainu	Sengoku	Green Bull
28.4%	28.2%	20.8%	15.8%	4.7%	1.7%	0.5%

While Garp was only a Vice Admiral, he was put in the poll, and he won it! Whitout him, it's Aokiji that is the favorite, followed by Fujitora.
Image 4

Who is your favorite Supernova (outside the Straw Hat)

Law	Kid	Bonney	Urouge	Bege	X Drake	Hawkins	Apoo	Killer
63.5%	12.4%	5.5%	4.5%	4.3%	4%	2.8%	1.7%	1.3%

Who else than the character that nearly managed to defeat Luffy in the 5 popularity poll? Law is the Favorite Supernova outside of the Straw Hat!

Which is your favourite canon arc in One Piece?

The Favorite Canon Story arc are (You could vote for more than 1) :

Position	Story arc	Result
N°1	Enies Lobby	43.3%
N°2	Marineford	39.8%
N°3	Wano	30.2%
N°4	Water 7	23.3%
N°5	Impel Down	19.6%

Which is your least favourite canon arc in One Piece?

The Least Favorite Canon Story arc are (You could vote for more than 1) :

Position	Story arc	Result
N°1	Long Ring Long Land Arc	37.2%
N°2	Fishmen Island	16.9%
N°3	Syrup Village	15.8%
N°4	Thriller Bark	10.1%
N°5	Punk Hazard	9.7%

Favorite Cover Story?

Position	Cover Story	Result
N°1	Enel's Great Space Operations	24%
N°2	From the Decks of the World : "The 500.000.000 Man Arc"	11%
N°3	The Stories of the Self-Proclaimed Straw Hat Grand Fleet	10.7%
N°4	Ace's Great Blackbeard Search	9.8%
N°5	Straw Hat's Separation Seria	9.6%

Character Design in One Piece :

Do you like the female character designs in One Piece?

Yes	No	I have no opinion.
63%	19%	18%

Do you like the male character designs in One Piece?

Yes	No	I have no opinion.
89.6%	0.9%	9.5%

It's true that Oda isn't the best when it comes to Female character design. However it seems like the majority of users don't have a problem with that.

Are fight a determining factor for your enjoyment of the series/arc?

Yes	No
52.6%	47.4%

Now this is rather surprising I must say. What do ou thing about this?

What is/are your (absolute) favourite aspect(s) of One Piece?

From the result we have, it seems like the World-Building is the favorite part of One Piece (With 88.6% of voters choosing this).
It's followed by The Adventure (69%), The characterization (54.4%), the Inter-character relationship (49.4%), the Action (36%) and the Art Style (26.2%).
And those result are obvious. Some of the most upvoted chapters of this subreddit are when we have huge world building moment, like 907 (Shanks talks to the Elders), or 957 (ULTIMATE).

Post-Timeskip is?

On Par with Pre-TS	Better than Pre-TS	Worse than Pre-TS
59.8%	28.2%	12%

This question is one of the most asked. With a lot of vocal voices saying that post TS is worse than Pre-TS.
It's different for sure, but now we know how the community feels about that.

If you could eat a Devil Fruit, what type would you want?

Paramecia	Zoan	Logia
28.9%	8.6%	62.5%

Most people could choose to eat a Logia, and it seems like becoming a Furry is the lesser choice in this subreddit.

The Final Antagonist of One Piece will be :

With 48.5% it's Blackbeard!
Really? That is surprising for me since it's obvious that Oda will make the SH fight against the World Government after they find the One Piece. And I honestly don't see Blackbeard being the final Antagonist because of that.
So people who voted for this, what was your reasoning for it?

What is One Piece Biggest Flaw?

Some of the biggest flaws mentionned are :

• The Pacing
  
• The Lack of characters' death outside of Flashback
  
• The Anime.
  

Which are all fair flaws to the series.

Random Questions about the Series :

As of Wano, is Jimbei stronger than Zoro?

Yes	No	Yes but Zoro will be stronger soon
9.8%	60.3	29.9%

I guess people really want Zoro to always be the second strongest no matter what... I expected this result, but I was still disappointed...

Was Zoro as strong as Luffy just after the timeskip?

Yes	No
31.5%	68.5%

I... Really? 31.5% said yes?

Will Sanji get laid by the end of the story?

Yes	No
49.6%	50.4%

Nearly the perfect split, and it's easy to see why it's very divisive. (Also shows that every vote counts).

Will Usopp be part of the 1 Billion Club by the end of the story?

Yes	No
76.4%	23.6%

The Straw Hats will go to Laugh Tales :

Before fighting the WG	After Fighting the WG
71.1%	28.9%

It's been hinted at a lot that the SH will go to Laugh Tales before taking on the WG. So for me it feels rather strange to have more than 1/4 voting for them reaching the final island after.

Who will be the one to defeat Kaido? (So give the last hit)

With 66.3% of the votes the one who will give the last hit to Kaido is : Luffy!
Followed by 11.5% with someone else (that isn't Law/Kid/Zoro/Big Mom/Scabbard/Admiral) and 11% by one of the Scabbard.
Zoro received 6.4% of the votes.

Who will be the first SH to realize their dream?

Luffy	Zoro	Nami	Usopp	Sanji	Chopper	Robin	Franky	Brook	Jinbe
16.2%	12.5%	3.2%	32.7%	7.8%	1.8%	15%	6.8%	2.8%	1.2%

Most users believe that Usopp will be the first one to realize his dream!
I also think the same as it's the easiest Dream to realize really. I could bet you it will happen in Elbaf.
After that, we have Luffy and Robin, and it make sense since their dreams are linked. Both can be done once they reach Laugh Tales.

How many members will the crew have at the end? (With Luffy)

And most people want 11 members total in the crew! (With 28.6%), 27.5% wants 12 members, wile 19.8% want the crew to be complete right now with Jinbe.

Who do you think wins in a 1v1 : An Emperor or an Admiral?

Yonko	Admiral
92.3%	7.7%

If you are active on the subreddit, you know it's one of the question that creates the most discussion/arguments about.
So it's nice to know the overall opinion of the subreddit on this question (Doesn't mean it's always correct mind you).

Is Mihawk emperor's level?

Yes	No
57.7%	42.3%

Also a very divisive question on this subreddit.

Is Aokiji emperor's level?

Yes	No
38.3%	61.7%

Is Akainu emperor's level?

Yes	No
66.2%	33.8%

So they fight for 10 days in a very close battle. With Akainu winning in the end, but after a long and hard fight. And one is Emperor's level while the other isn't?
Really? I find that hard to understand.

If Oden was alive would he be stronger than Mihawk

Yes	No
63.7%	36.3%

How strong was Oden at the time of his death?

The strongest	Top 3	Top 5	Top 10	Top 20	< Top 20
1.4%	15.4%	32.5%	37.5%	11.9%	1.4%

I like Oden, but sometimes I feel like people are overestimating him.

Who is stronger between Shanks and Mihawk?

Shanks	Mihawk
85.6%%	14.4%

This is also one of the question creating the most arguments on this subreddit, after all Mihawk is the World Strongest Swordman. But Shanks is an Emperor and became one after losing his arm.

Is Kaido stronger now that 20 years ago?

Yes, he's stronger	Same level	Weaker
64.5%	26.3	9.2%

Had Ace survived, would Wano be liberated by now?

Yes	No
17.9%	82.1%

Could the Marines take on ALL the Yonko at the same time ?

Yes	Yes in Marineford only	No	2 at the same time	3 at the same time
2.4%	3.3%	68.6%	23%	2.7%

This question is also linked to how you see the Emperor vs Admiral. So depending on which side you are on, you are more likely to pick Yes or No.

Which character do you want focus on next?

Rank	Character	%
N°1	Vegapunk	24.7%
N°2	Dragon	18.8%
N°3	Shanks	14.6%

All very good choices, and all of them are character we have known for a long time without really knowing.

Will Blackbeard find the One Piece before Luffy?

Yes	No
18.7%	81.3%

How strong is Monkey D. Dragon?

The strongest	Top 3	Top 5	Top 10	< Top 10
3%	18.8%	31.8%	37.5%	8.9%

Here, most people seems to think that Luffy's father, Garp's son is part of the strongest characters of the series. Oda better respond to our expectations then.
As for his Bounty : Well, 31.6% think it will be more than 6 Billions and 28.1% think it will be between 5-6 billions.
That remind me, I once made a poll asking people what Sabo's bounty would be (since we knew it was getting revealed in a magazine soon). So maybe I will do the same for Dragon? That could be nice.

Who is currently the strongest Emperor?

Kaido	Shanks	Blackbeard	Big Mom
43.1%	26.4%	26.3%	4.2%

I wonder if the recent chapters made people change their perception on this...

What are the fights you would want to see?

Fight	%
Blackbeard vs Shanks	55.5%
Garp vs Rocks	54.9%
Garp vs Roger	54.8%
Mihawk vs Shanks	52.6%
Akainu vs Aokiji	44.6%

How long do you think One Piece has left? (At a rate of 40 chapters a year)

Image 5.
As you can see, most people think One Piece has at least 5 years left to go on. We will know Oda is terrible with respecting his own objectives. And this is good. The more One Piece the better.

On a scale from Spandam to Whitebeard/Roger, How strong is Im?

For this question, it seems like most people put Im at the same level as Whitebeard/Roger with 28.6% voting Im being there.
I honestly don't know how strong I want Im to be.

What arcs, after Wano, do you want?

The arcs people want the most are :

Arc	%
Elbaf	79.8%
Laugh Tales	68.6%
Vegapunk	67.5%
The Final War	66.3%
Red Hair Pirates	38.2%

So arcs teased for years (Elbaf/Laugh Tales/Final War) and about character that people want to see (Vegapunk/Red Hair pirates).

How is Blackbeard able to use multiples Devil Fruits?

Reason	%
More than 1 soul	29.5%
Weird Body	29.7%
Yami Yami	35.2%
Other	5.6%

It's one of those question were people have very different opinion about. And right now there isn't really a major concensus in the fandom, even if the theory about it being related to the Yami Yami is more popular.
In the Other catergory, there was the Cerberus Devil Fruit option, Blackbeard being a Triplet, him being actually 2+ kids in a trenchcoat, him being a failed Vegapunk experiment, having several stomachs him being pregnant (Stop reading fanfiction), him putting the power inside his rings, being a great guy and him being a cunt.

Haki is :

Image 6
Overall, People like Haki in the series, with a 4.38 out of 5!

How many arcs are left after Wano?

Image 7
Here, it seems like the answer for the community would be 4-5 arcs left. Which would then make (base don the How long One Piece has left), like a year per arc on average.

The final war of One Piece will be :

Reason	%
SH+RA vs WG+Marines vs BB	50.8%
SH+RA vs WG+Marines	37.6%
SH vs RA vs WG	6.8%
Other	4.8%

I just don't see Blackbeard being in the final war, as my opinion is that he will be dealt with before it. For the other answers, there was Straw Hats vs Blackbeard Pirates, Family of D vs vs im sama, Total civil war in marines, Straw Hat vs Shanks, Straw hat vs Pound, Zoro vs World Goverment, Dugongs vs buggy.

Will Luffy die at the end of One Piece?

Will Luffy die?	%
Yes	28%
No	72%

An ending were Luffy died wouldn't be a good ending for me. He needs to survive and go on more adventures.

Are Shakky and Rayleigh Mihawk's parent?

Answer	%
Yes	10.2%
No	89.9%

Will the crew still be together at the end of the series?

Answer	%

Yes, they will keep going on adventure together.| 57.6% o, they will move on, like the Roger Pirates| 42.4%
Like with Luffy living, I want the Crew to stay together, and sail together for many more adventures. I could see them taking breaks from time to time, but them staying together would be the best ending for me.

Can the Red Line be destroyed with Ancient Weapons?

Answer	%
Yes	91.9%
No	8.1%

What is the biggest mystery left to be revealed?

The most common answers were : The Void Century, the Will of D, Im, The One Piece, Joy Boy, Luffy's mother and Who is Pandaman?

What is the One Piece?

Here, there was plenty of : "No idea", The friends we made along the way, a Devil Fruit, Knowledge, Uranus, History, a book, my mom.

What sort of Devil Fruit do you want to see in the story?

The most common answer was : Water Logia! Followed by Wind Logia and people wanting more mythical Zoans.

What is the craziest theory you believe?

Here are a few of them :

• Shanks is a Celestial Dragon
• That Vegapunk is going to flip a switch in the Pacifista programming to fight the marines at the end.
• Luffy's mom was a celestial dragon
• Devil fruits are all artificial from the void century
• That Finland doesn't exist
• Zoro is going to get Rodger's disease
• D's were the original Celestial Dragons
• Weevil was made by Vegapunk using Whitebeard's cells and then was discarded until Bakkin picked him up
• One of the Roger Pirates (probably Scopper Gaban) is on Laugh Tale waiting for whoever finds it, sort of like how Crocus and Rayleigh seem to be positioned to monitor rookie pirates
• Onigashima is an Oarz like skeleton and Big Mom is gonna bring it to life.
• The different races came from other planets/moons
• Tama is a Kurozomi
• Ussop is a descendant of Mont Blanc Nolan
• Luffy hatched from an egg.
• The fish that bit Shanks's arm off was Joyboy's pet
• Bon chan is Kin'emon's son
• Oda no longer draws the manga
• bonney and ace having a child
• That Perospero is going to help kill Big Mom.
• Dragon being former Admiral

What are your favorites?
And here it is, the 500K survey! Took me far too long to make, as I underestimated the time needed to sort the answer and create this post. Like damn.
I hope you enjoyed it. The anwers for the Survey Saga will be up next in some time.

For years, when the topic of real world influences on the cultures of Nirn have come up, one particular race has always gotten the short end of the stick when it came to having a fair description. That race, is the Bosmer, also known as the Wood Elves. It's always irked me that while other races had their fair share of real world comparisons, the Wood Elves were always painted with broad strokes and generic explanations. There's much more to the Bosmer than people have bothered to describe them as, and I feel if no one else is going to bother writing about these real world parallels, then screw it, it's my off day, I just had a steak at 10 in the morning, so I guess I will.
Before I start in on who the Bosmer are based off of, or, at the very least, who the Bosmer could strongly, STRONGLY be argued to be based off of, I'd like to say who they're not based off, and more specifically, why the descriptions they've been given to real world peoples is, well, lacking.
First, I'll start off with the most popular one, being Native Americans. Saying Wood Elves are based on Native Americans is incorrect, not because there isn't necessarily influence from them, but because the term Native American is an encompassing term for a variety of different people. People who's cultures are as different as the Italian Renaissance and Feudal Japan. Sure, I understand why some would say Native American and leave at that. There are times when it can't be helped. You're building a world, you're basing culture and peoples off the real world, but sometimes it's easier just to say "These people I'm writing about are based on Asia" because those fictional people you are writing about have culturally significant symbols like dragons and other things one could find shared among many cultures in the East. The problem is, despite the fact that though certain motifs can be witnessed among multiple cultures, it's a very base level description. Some could even consider it offensive depending on how certain peoples interpret certain shared cultural relevancies. Jesus I'm saying culture a lot. Anyway, what I'm getting at is, on a shallow, first glance, sure, you can say "Wood Elves" are Native Americans.
But not all Native Americans share the things people have pinned on to Bosmer. Not every Native American tribe was some Archer Hippie. Also, most tribes didn't partake in cannibalism, ritualistic or otherwise. This is actually something, that, if someone were to get offended by, I could understand. It indirectly buys into that old Hollywood interpretation of Amerindians being savages. That just wasn't the case. Yes, there were a very few tribes that occasionally took part in ritualistic cannibalism. But for every one tribe that did, there was a thousand that didn't. Well, probably not a thousand. Don't quote me on that, but just know that it was a rarity, and that saying Bosmer are based on Native Americans, especially when including ritualistic cannibalism, doesn't work. Mostly because, ritualistic cannibalism can be found in a number of cultures across the planet, so.... yeah, don't... don't say that. It's also important to note the other Native American describers used for Wood Elves (IE archery, close with nature) are so broad that it not only doesn't work from a Native American standpoint, it doesn't work from ANY standpoint. Do you know what other cultures have been good at archery or close with nature or both? Frikkin. All of them. Or at least damn near so. Look at a timeline for any culture in the world prior to the Renaissance. The probability that you'll find one if not both of these things is high. Having said all this, there is a Native American tribe, one, that the wood elves absolutely do have a shared parallel with, and I'll get to that in a minute. For now, I'll continue on to what the Bosmer are not.
Secondly, the Bosmer are not a barebones Celtic placeholder. This is has been tossed around a bit here and there due to the naming trends of the Wood Elves. Make no mistake, these names are absolutely based on Irish and Welsh names, but there's way more to it than that. You're probably wondering "Well wait, Fruitlessideas, are they based on Celts or not". Well, yes... but also no. Here's what I mean. You can take ANY race or culture from The Elder Scrolls, and at any given time, find that they're based on anywhere from 5 different cultures, to even 20, if you so look hard enough. The reason I say Bosmer aren't just Celts, is because they're not. Now, there is a significant influence from the real world Celtic people, but 1.) it goes beyond just their names, and 2.) in spite of that, it does NOT take up the majority of the influence for the Wood Elves.
Which brings me to my third, and final "thing the Bosmer are not", and that is, a generically, high-fantasy trope, or a "realm of the fairies and pixies" inspired race. It's not a secret that the modern elf we know of is based almost entirely on JRR Tolkien's elves in LotR. If not based in the cultures or values of his elves, at least in the physiology, as described as a gracefully built people, with "leaf shaped" or pointed ears. Peter Jackson also has a significant role in this, based on the fact that his movies brought to life this fantasy world, and because of that, when people think of elves, they thing of Lego's Ass. Let go Lass. Orlando Bloom. Elf Boy.
Here's the thing though, people often forget just how fleshed out Tolkien's writings were, not just about the stories he wrote, but also about the people's he wrote about. The elves, if I'm remembering right, had something like three of four different cultures in his books. Even if I'm wrong, and it's only, about two, he still wrote so much about them, that to say that either were the same people would be folly, and by extension, saying Bosmer are based on generic high fantasy elves, or Tolkien elves, is disingenuous. Because honestly, which ones? Which ones do you mean? All of them? Cause they're not all the same. HOWEVER, even in a world where they were all the same, saying Bosmer are based on these "made up cultures" doesn't work either. It only takes a five minute search to know that some of Tolkien's elves, if not all to some extent, were based HEAVILY on ancient Welsh and Irish people, as well as Norse mythology, seeing as that's kind of where elves come from. And, if we look at the Peter Jackson films, we can see a clear Art Nouveau influence in much of the architecture of the elves. So, giving this overly broad description of the Bosmer to being something akin to your basic DND, or Tolkien, or Fantasy elf race, doesn't work. Now, if one were to say that the Wood Elves of Valenwood had deep Welsh and Irish influences, they'd be right on the money. You could say they have a Nordic influence, based on the fact that, in Norse mythology, there are elves, but personally, I wouldn't. And seeing as I have no idea what Valenwood looks like, I can't say if there is an Art Nouveau inspiration in their architecture, but if anyone out there who has played ESO, been to Valenwood, and knows what the hell Art Nouveau is, please feel free to let me know if the Bosmer have it or not. I think it's cool.
SO, those are what the Bosmer are not. Now, let me tell you what they SUPER are influenced by, or at least, as I said before, COULD BE STRONGLY ARGUED THAT THEY ARE INFLUENCED BY. I'm not going to give ultra long paragraphs at this point because it has dawned on me, I'm in my 20's writing about a fictional fantasy race instead of applying myself to be better in life or getting laid.
Before I begin, I want it to be known that, this is not an "end all, be all" list. I'm sure there's other influences on the Bosmer other than what I'm going to say. These are just what I believe to be major influences. I'd also like to add, that I don't think Bethesda ever planned to have as much cultural influence on these races as they currently do. I think it's only because of us a fans making comparisons on our own, and overanalyzing these things as we do, that the significance of our real world peoples have been incorporated into the races of Nirn. So, without any further ado, and little to no milking of this post left... here are the real world cultures that the Bosmer most resemble, and that I've never found anyone comparing them too.
4.) Starting from the bottom and working my way up (or technically down), the Iroquois. Many know that the Wood Elves have a "Mourning War", but what many may not know is this based off the real world practice of the Iroquois Mourning War. Essentially, and I'm paraphrasing here, when a tribe member dies, they are "replaced" by a new member. This new member is a hostage, usually stolen from a neighboring tribe, if not by the tribe that killed the original tribe member. They are then made into a new member of the mourning tribe. If I remember right, the Wood Elves will torture the poor bastard to test their merit or something like that. Good way to make friends, I guess.
3.) And coming second to last, were bringing back the Celts, but not really, but kind of. "But wait! You said they weren't, but you said they were, but you said they weren't?!". I know what I said, don't tell me what I said. I was the one who said it. As stated earlier, the Bosmer aren't "just Celts", but they DO have a Celtic influence, mostly, at least to my observation anyway, what seems to be ancient all the way to early middle ages Irish and Welsh. I would like to say there's also a strong Druidic inspiration that comes from this, but the fact of the matter is, I don't know enough about ancient Celtic Druidism to make that claim, and I don't want to confuse fantasy Druidism with actual Druidism, assuming that they are absolutely nothing alike. Which maybe they are. And if they are, then that's what I'm gonna say. That there's a strong Welsh and Irish Druidic influence. But I don't know for sure on that part so.... I won’t. Moving on.
2.) Next on the list, is a trifecta, because these three next groups have all done this seemingly amazing thing, that I would believe would be part of Valenwood society (IE villages, towns, and cities), and also because I'm lazy and don't feel like making three points for essentially the same damn reasoning. These people are the Indonesian Baduy people, and the Indian Khasi and Jaintia (Pnar) people. The reasoning for these three groups is due to the fact that all have have built Living Root Bridges. What that means is, they've effectively taken the roots of trees and made them into bridges. These bridges are still alive. They are never not alive. They continue to grow into each other over the years, strengthening the bridges. Earlier, I spoke how people paint broad strokes of Native Americans as being in touch with nature, but if this isn’t as "in touch with nature" as it gets, then I don't what the hell I'm doing anymore. Again, I haven't seen Valenwood in game, and I can only assume what it looks like in ESO, but if I had to bet a nickel and a dime, I'd say, Living Root Architecture is probably, most definitely, something Bosmer would have, and by that logic, I say these three tribes of Indonesia and India are the second most influential, real world culture when it comes to the Bosmer.
1.) And finally, there is one. I won't say a lot about this next group, only because, well, I think you, the reader, should read about them on your own when you get the chance, because they're a very interesting people. They are known as the Korowai. They're a people found in Indonesia, specifically Papua. Said to be reclusive and to have had little contact with the outside world, up until about 2018, they were known as a "tree dwelling" tribe. For the longest time, they had been reported to live in tree houses in Indonesia, and though this has been found to be false, the fact that it was so widely believed by those who knew of the Korowai for such a long time, I think that in and of itself has enough significance and merit to say that it would be an influence on the Bosmer. Moving past that though, the Korowai, like the Bosmer, practiced ritual cannibalism. To what extent, I don't know, but I do know they did it for awhile, but have stopped over the past few years due to growing contact with the outside world.
Now, lives in trees, practices ritualistic cannibalism, isolated from the rest of the world... sounds a bit familiar doesn't it?
I also want to point out the ever present South Asian influence that's shown up in other cultures of Tamriel, in case anyone were to think this assessment of mine is far fetched. You can see it in the Khajiit, the Dunmer, and, even to a small degree, the ancient Falmer. Specifically, you can observe the cultures of India and Indonesia. There seems to be a recurring theme with those two countries. If those influences can show up in other TES cultures, it's not out of the question to say they might influence the Bosmer.
Bonus half-baked, maybe, maybe not influence: The Maori. I was iffy about placing this on here, but I thought, eh, screw it. Do it. Someone gets mad, then they get mad. The reason I say the Maori, is due not necessarily because they too, in the past, practiced ritualistic cannibalism, but because they practiced it on their fallen enemies, something they share in common with the Wood Elves of Valenwood. I wanted to make other comparisons like tattoos, but seeing as I can find no writing that places significance on tattooing, and more specifically, tattooing ceremonies of the face (like that of the Maori), I'll leave that be until someone at Zenimax or Bethesda decide to add Ta Moko face tattoos to the Bosmeri culture.
Anyway, a-dee, a-dee, a-dee, a that's all folks!
Edit: Thank you for the silver anonymous human! Edit 2: Thank you other human for the other award! Actually, you know what? I’m just gonna save time and say thank you for the current awards, and in case I get anymore, thank you for those too!

Well, boys, I reckon this is it - nuclear combat toe to toe with the Roosskies. Now look, boys, I ain't much of a hand at makin' speeches, but I got a pretty fair idea that something doggone important is goin' on back there. And I got a fair idea the kinda personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinkin'. Heck, I reckon you wouldn't even be human bein's if you didn't have some pretty strong personal feelin's about nuclear combat. I want you to remember one thing, the folks back home is a-countin' on you and by golly, we ain't about to let 'em down.
Major Kong, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb [quote here] [full film available here at archive.org, highly recommend, definitive American dark comedy on the subject]
Hello! We're sort of taking a break from East Asia-specific this week to talk about a great conversation-starter: Thermonuclear war. As developments in this area have not entirely halted in the past few decades, and yet I suspect most [not all--there's probably like one 80-year-old or something] of the readers of this post were either not alive during the Cold War or were too young to really appreciate most of what was happening during that period, I feel that it's important to cover the topic, especially with "great-power competition" being a new buzzword and the possibility that the NPT and the other arms control and limitation agreements that have been prominent for the past few decades falling apart being very real.
I'm sorry in advance if I occasionally get a bit repetitive but I think I've made a fairly comprehensive post on the subject, and I don't think I've particularly biased it one way or the other [though of course, that's what I would think].
Glossary:
Bunker-buster = nuclear warhead designed to destroy hardened sites, like bunkers or missile silos
Nuclear weapon = nuclear bomb = nuclear warhead = weapon that uses an operating principle based on nuclear physics
Thermonuclear weapon = more advanced type of nuclear weapon that uses fusion as its primary energy source rather than fission
Warhead = the part of the weapon that goes boom
Fuze = what sets off the bomb, distinct from fuse, which is an electrical part
Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty = one of the biggest arms control treaties in recent years, barred the US and USSRussia from having land-based missiles that were nuclear capable with a range from 500km to 5500km]
Ballistic missile = missile that travels in ballistic trajectories, fast, difficult to intercept, accuracy problems and always powered by rockets
Cruise missile = missile that travels in the atmosphere, smaller, difficult to intercept but easier than ballistic missiles--but harder to detect, powered by jet engines and air-breathing and thus slower
SRBM = Short-range ballistic missile [1000km range or less, most less than 300km to comply with MTCR or less than 500km to comply with the former INF Treaty]
MRBM = Medium-range ballistic missile [1000km to 3000km range, common in arsenals outside the US and Russia]
IRBM = Intermediate-range ballistic missile [3000km to 5500km range, common in arsenals outside the US and Russia, previously barred by the INF Treaty
ICBM = Intercontinental ballistic missile [5500km+ range, standard in US and Russian arsenals, China, France, and possibly North Korea operate a handful]
SSBN = "boomer" = ballistic missile submarine, nuclear powered and nuclear armed [no conventionally armed ballistic missile subs exist at present to the best of my knowledge, the only proposal being known a Trident conventional version]
Early warning = the systems used to detect missile launches and track them, could be ground-based radars or satellites
MIRV = Multiple independent reentry vehicles, a way to attach multiple warheads to one missile
SLBM = submarine-launched ballistic missile
Tactical nuke = determined by usage, not yield, tactical nukes are meant to be used in conflicts that do not escalate to an all-out nuclear war
Countervalue = a capability to strike against an opponent's cities and hard targets
Counterforce = a capability to strike against an opponent's hardened missile silos
Gravity bomb = nuke dropped from a plane
Nuclear triad = the full set of nuclear delivery methods: Air-launched cruise missiles/bombs, submarine-launched missiles, and ground-based missiles
SDI = "Star Wars" = strategic defense initiative, the origin of all of America's modern missile defense efforts
ABM = anti-ballistic missile
Nuclear sharing = a system via which nuclear warheads, owned by the US, are located in NATO countries [and in the past non-NATO countries] and can be turned over to their management in wartime
Some particular pieces of hardware to know about:
Trident = the submarine-launched ballistic missile currently used by the US and UK, can carry up to 14 warheads in MIRV configuration [typically 4 under treaty limits], solid-fueled and an ICBM as well as a SLBM
Minuteman-III = the current ground-based nuclear deterrent of the United States, ICBM, also MIRVed to handle 3 warheads, built in the 1960s originally and solid-fueled
Peacekeeper = MX = LGM-118 = the most sophisticated ground-based ICBM fielded by the United States and, possibly, by any power, solid-fueled and carried 12 [limited by treaty to 10] MIRVed warheads. Retired in 2005 due to high cost and arms limitation treaties. Meant to replace Minuteman.

1. The Bomb

The very first nuclear bombs relied on fission, the power of splitting atoms of fissile material to generate vast amounts of energy very quickly in a chain reaction. The general principle here is critical mass. Once a critical mass of the fissile material is achieved--usually either Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239--it activates a chain reaction which results in a nuclear explosion. These bombs are very simple in operating principle--pretty much anyone could build one if given the requisite materials. The main problem, and the reason we have not yet seen a nuclear warhead DIY, is that the fissile materials are very difficult to get. One must either synthesize plutonium in an atomic pile or use one of the various methods developed to enrich uranium--gaseous diffusion and centrifuges being the major ones. Either one takes a significant amount of time and specialized equipment, at least to produce nuclear weapons in any quantity. However, when you get down to it, any sufficiently motivated group could build one of these--at least if not stopped by another, more motivated group. Even North Korea could do this.
The next step in evolution was the boosted fission nuke. It represented a nuclear weapon that was more capable, but not radically so. By adding fusion fuel to the nuclear weapon, specifically the fission assembly, you could get a better yield--splitting more of the atoms in the core assembly before it suffered a critical existence failure and got spread out over several square miles. Fission-boosting is also fairly easily done, with the main obstacle being obtaining enough deuterium, lithium, and/or tritium to do the job correctly. These are, to my knowledge, pretty seldom seen; but I would suspect that both Pakistan and North Korea have them.
Thermonuclear weapons are, however, a major leap in capability. Much larger yield warheads can be built, in the multi-megaton range, and miniaturization is also possible, which is very useful for missiles in particular. Thermonuclear weapons rely on adding a fusion "secondary" stage, which is set off by a "primary" fission stage and generates vast quantities of energy. However, thermonuclear weapons are much more difficult to develop than fission-based weapons; largely because they rely on exotic materials and classified physics to operate. The United States itself has had difficulty building new thermonuclear weapons, or refreshing ones in current inventory, because it has lost knowledge of how to build some key materials. Most nuclear powers, however, are believed to or known to possess thermonuclear weapons, the exceptions being Pakistan and North Korea.

2. The Cold War

Nuclear weapons were probably the defining feature of the Cold War, at least once it finally began in earnest in the 1950s. To this day, the Cold War defines the cultural conception of nuclear weapons.
What this is about, though, is more a mechanical than philosophical or sociological discussion, explaining why nukes were, and are, used. Or rather, are planned to be used, because despite hundreds of nuclear tests, nobody has ever used a nuclear weapon in wartime in just over 75 years, since the US dropped a crude plutonium device on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
The very beginning of nuclear war involved hundreds of strategic bombers--first B-29s, which actually cost more than the Manhattan Project to develop--and then more advanced jet bombers, the most iconic of which and perhaps the most enduring is the B-52 Stratofortress, which the US Air Force expects to remain in service through possibly the end of the century. These were the only viable delivery vehicles, and thus both the US [well, mostly the US] and the Soviet Union rushed to build as many of them as possible, with [unfounded] concerns of a "Bomber Gap" resulting in the construction of thousands of strategic bombers. In the event of war, these bombers would take off from their bases and drop nuclear bombs on enemy positions. For a substantial length in time, the US actually maintained a constant patrol of B-52 bombers with nuclear warheads onboard, which, in the event of a surprise attack, would retaliate against the USSR. It is one of these bombers which Dr Strangelove focuses on--though I should note that only a handful of people actually possessed the ability to launch a nuclear strike, and even then only in contingencies when the president was unavailable, and this persists to this day, excepting submarines--which will be mentioned in a moment.
However, technology marched on, and soon the ballistic missile became the delivery vehicle of choice. Early ballistic missiles were relatively crude, based off of the original V-2 design and whose quality was largely determined by how many Nazis you had stolen at the end of the Second World War. However, technology continued to evolve, and soon ICBMs had enough accuracy to launch countervalue attacks. These attacks targeted cities and aimed to deter an enemy from launching a first strike by ensuring that doing so would destroy the nation of the attacker. This doesn't mean that ballistic missiles were the only delivery method, though. Smaller nuclear weapons were built, designed to be delivered by air. They offered greater accuracy and tactical utility, and lowered the risk of a strategic nuclear exchange breaking out. It was around this time that tactical and strategic nuclear exchanges began to be devised in nuclear theory, with tactical nukes becoming essential to NATO war plans due to the numerical, and sometimes qualitative, inferiority of their conventional forces when faced with Warsaw Pact opponents. Nuclear weapons found their way into practically every kind of format. Nuclear-tipped air-to-air rockets were an early invention, aimed at shooting down massed bomber formations. Nuclear-tipped surface-to-air-missiles soon followed. Nuclear anti-ship missiles, nuclear artillery, and even "backpack nukes" like the Atomic Demolition Munition all were developed for a variety of purposes. Nuclear depth charges, nuclear torpedoes--if you put explosives in something, chances are someone drew up a plan to put a nuke in it. [as an aside, Cold War schemes to use nuclear weapons to perform massive construction projects, such as liquidating the Athabasca Tar Sands or creating a giant salt lake in Egypt, are one of my favorite Cold War relics]. Nukes were the bread and butter of Cold War strategy in a way that seems hardly conceivable today. This is largely why both the US and USSR had stockpiles of tens of thousands of weapons.
Mutual assured destruction, or MAD as it is commonly known, was also derived during this time, suggesting that the way to prevent nuclear war was by ensuring that any initiation of nuclear combat would lead to certain destruction. The development of SSBNs and SLBMs, which provided a way to ensure survivability of the nuclear arsenal and a sure second strike capability--usually countervalue because of the lower accuracy of SLBMs--seemed to make this set in stone. These would avoid destruction in a first strike by hiding within the ocean, and would then launch based off of orders issued from base--or, in the case of Britain, off of orders written by the Prime Minister and secured in the submarines to be opened in event of war.
Unfortunately, life tends to make things more complicated, and this was and is the case with MAD. The first problem that developed was that of the MIRV, or Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle. This allowed missiles to carry large numbers of warheads, as many as twelve in the case of the LGM-118 Peacekeeper [probably the most sophisticated ICBM ever developed, the Soviet R-36 threw 10 and Trident D5 14 smaller warheads]. As a result of this fact, combined with increasing accuracy of reentry vehicles [especially, it is thought, on the part of the United States], a counterforce strike that could eliminate an enemy's ground-based nuclear deterrent became possible. MIRVs also place a high value on first-strike because each MIRVed missile can destroy numerous enemy silos but is correspondingly more vulnerable to first-strike as it replaces a dozen independent missiles with a single one. As a result limitations of MIRVed warheads have been a major focus of arms reduction treaties and several attempts have been made to ban usage of the technology altogether. Other problems complicated the situation further, such as anti-ballistic missiles, which potentially could shelter a nation from a weak second-strike. However, this broadly describes most of the key elements of nuclear war, skipping over the vast cultural and political impacts of nuclear weapons for the most part, because that's not really what I'm focused on here.

3. Arms control and non-proliferation

From the moment the US first got its hands on the bomb, it sought to keep it away from everyone else, including a very miffed Britain which had been promised access to the secrets learned from the Manhattan Project as a result of the contributions of its "Tube Alloys" program to the American development of the bomb. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, or McMahon Act, has largely set American nuclear policy since its creation. Britain ultimately developed its own nuclear bomb, and the Soviets, in a large part thanks to the involvement of traitorous American nuclear scientists, developed their own bomb as well. By the 1950s, the world was in a frantic race to build the bomb--those who had it, to build more of them, and those who didn't, to get them. Even Sweden ran a nuclear weapons program. France got the bomb, and China did as well--much to the chagrin of the Soviets, who had undergone a dramatic split with the Chinese a few years earlier and whose original research work was invaluable in contributing to the Chinese nuclear program. It must be understood that back in those days building nuclear weapons was much more difficult than it is now, without computers or without even easy resources as to how they functioned. Nowadays, I can learn how to build a nuke off of Wikipedia, and, barring the ten tons of heavy water, hundreds of kilograms of natural uranium, and large quantity of nitric acid required, doing so is a relatively trivial task.
The real shift, however, began around 1970. The first major act in this was the development of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in which all the nuclear powers promised to work towards the reduction and abolition of nuclear weapons, and in return the majority of non-nuclear powers agreed not to build nukes, and it is upon this foundation that the modern order is built. However, it has hardly proved perfectly successful--only six years later the detonation of the first Indian nuclear weapon occurred, which had been built using Canadian technology that had not been adequately controlled, or, indeed, controlled at all--the reactors Canada sells are, by the way, essentially DIY kits for nuclear weapons. As a result, an increasingly involved control regime began to be built. The IAEA was founded and membership was generally required for the ownership of nuclear reactors. The nuclear powers banded together to ensure that critical components of nuclear programs were not exported, pressured nations in their own blocs into cancelling nuclear programs [as the US did to both South Korea and Taiwan], and, barring some relatively low-profile cheating on the part of China, which has sold peripheral equipment to North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran, this vast patchwork mostly held together. As a result, instead of a predicted 30-40 nuclear weapons states, there are only 9 today.
Also around this time, both the US and USSR recognized that spending large quantities on building ever-increasing quantities of nuclear weapons without either side gaining any decisive advantage was helping absolutely nobody, and the two states began to agree to various reductions in arms and limitations in weapons development, including the ABM treaty and SALT.

4. Anti-ballistic missiles and Star Wars

Eventually, starting in around the 1970s, people got the idea that maybe you could stop ICBMs. This sounds absolutely ludicrous--but it wasn't, per se, impossible, and it led to a lot of really advanced, science-fiction sounding technology.
The very first method was to launch interceptor rockets that carried H-bombs of their own, aiming to detonate them close enough to the missiles that they would either destroy the reentry vehicles, their electronics, or cause a non-critical "fissile" of the warhead. This was halted, however, by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, one of the first big arms limitations agreements, and also by a simple fact: Ground-based missile interceptors are generally much more expensive than building additional missiles--for instance, the US Ground-Based Midcourse Defense costs more to produce, missile for missile, than a LGM-118 with 12 warheads. This treaty actually held for its full term, despite what you may have expected, as it did not limit research, only the actual building of anti-ballistic missile systems, and actually, IIRC, excluded space-based defenses via omission. However, until Ronald Reagan came along, the idea of ABMs was largely cast to the wayside.
Reagan, however, revived the idea quite famously in his Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars" by many. It explored a number of ideas, many of which were quite outlandish--one of the more successful proposals, at least in terms of how much funding or attention was devoted to it, involved setting off nuclear warheads in space to power x-ray lasers to shoot down enemy missiles, which if nothing else sounded really cool. By far the most practical program to emerge out of this, however [a rather relative merit], was called "Brilliant Pebbles". It relied on a constellation of tens of thousands of kinetic interceptors, small, only a few kilograms each, which would target and destroy any ballistic missiles in low orbit. This plan was supposed to solve the issue where interceptors were more expensive than missiles, and allow the US unquestioned missile superiority.
It was also around this time when surface-to-air missile systems, originally designed with the mission to shoot down aircraft, began gaining limited anti-ballistic missile capabilities, which were... somewhat underwhelming in the Gulf War, though the technology was brand new at the time.

5. Peace dividend

When the Cold War finally ended, one of the parts of the peace dividend that probably made more sense than most was the vast savings made on nuclear weapons. The trend had already begun in the late Cold War, but once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, stockpiles fell from tens of thousands of warheads to just a few thousand on the part of the US and Russia. All sides had a vested interest in arms reduction, and so those thousands of warheads were disassembled and largely turned into fuel for nuclear reactors.
Ballistic missile defenses also got cut. The original Brilliant Pebbles scheme was cancelled and replaced with a less-expensive but substantially less effective program called the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, which relies on a relative handful of interceptor missiles in Alaska to shoot down ballistic missiles in the midcourse stage; primarily designed with China or North Korea in mind [oddly enough the first ballistic missile defense program of the US was also designed with the intent of stopping a Chinese nuclear attack]. Ironically Ground-Based Midcourse Defense ended up costing a large portion [more than half] of what the final Brilliant Pebbles implementations were proposed at, for a system with very limited capabilities [this cancellation may have also been part of what killed the DC-X spacecraft].
Vast fleets of SSBNs were disassembled. Expensive delivery platforms and programs, like the MX Peacekeeper, were scrapped. All in all, the threat of nuclear war practically vanished, excepting on the subcontinent, where India and Pakistan engaged in nuclear showboating multiple times. It's really hard to understate the sheer magnitude of what happened, with the number of warheads in existence shrinking from around 70,000 to 10,000 or so, with around half of those today being inactive. The US Navy went from stocking multiple warheads on each ship to removing them entirely from the fleet, aside from, of course, the SSBNs.
The successor states of the USSR, aside from Russia itself, were successfully convinced to hand over their nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees--Ukraine most infamously--and their fissile materials were turned into [relatively] harmless nuclear fuel. South Africa became the first nation with an independently developed nuclear arsenal to voluntarily denuclearize, admittedly largely out of fear of what the black population might do with the bomb.
Other areas saw major reductions and non--proliferation efforts. The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program decommissioned large quantities of nuclear delivery vehicles and Soviet biological and chemical weapons sites. The Missile Technology Control Regime expanded and enveloped most nations with the capability to develop ballistic missiles and long-range cruise missiles, making nuclear weapons delivery difficult for the aspiring third world dictator--for instance, an Iraqi program to develop a ballistic missile in partnership with Argentina was scrapped by American pressure and Argentine admittance into the MTCR. While India and Pakistan still harassed each other, their open non-nuclear conventional war assuaged some concerns while raising others [perhaps nuclear powers could engage in conventional war after all]. Nuclear programs in several countries were stopped by diplomatic pressure, as in Libya, rather than by Israeli bombing campaigns.
For a time, all was peaceful. In the last decade or so, however, things have changed--and for the most part, they have done so below the radar of even Washington policymakers.

6. A Return To The Old Days?

Things in the past decade or so, however, have changed the nuclear situation substantially.
First on the list is that North Korea now has nuclear weapons and, it seems, a deterrent. This has seriously tested the efficacy of non-proliferation already, with the merit of non-proliferation when North Korea and Pakistan have weapons being rather suspect. Iran is also building nukes. North Korea's case was, and is, dangerous in particular because it suggests that, barring strong support from a great power, nukes are the only way to maintain autonomy [Ukraine and Libya both offering examples of why surrendering nukes, or even a nuclear program, is a bad idea to the world], and that they aren't too difficult to get. North Korea also may well already be engaging in proliferation activities as a revenue source--it's already known that they sell ballistic missile delivery vehicles and have exported materials related to chemical weapons production in the past, so exporting nuclear technology is hardly a stretch, especially given that North Korea is not seriously threatened by these activities and they provide a useful revenue source for the regime. As a result, the non-proliferation circle built over decades by the various great powers now has a rather large North Korea-shaped hole in it. This, however, isn't leading to big changes in Russia, China, and the United States. Rather, technological advancements, largely by the US and China, are slowly nibbling away at the tenuous nuclear peace.
Second is the problem, for Russia, created by the new Trident super-fuze. Under cover of a "refurbishment" of the Trident warhead family, a new fuze was introduced. However, this fuze is no mere one-for-one replacement: Instead, it allows the warhead to detonate within a range of zones that could destroy the target, allowing warheads that would previously overfly the target and miss to instead detonate in an airbust directly above said target. In effect, it increased the power of Trident by as many as five times, and has made it into a counterforce or first strike weapon. Quoted figures are a .86 probability of kill for a 10kpsi target, about as hard as defensive structures get, and .99 probability of kill for a standard, 2kpsi hardened target. As most of Russia's missile silos are only secure to the point of the latter, and Russia uses liquid-fueled ICBMs for the most part that are much more sensitive to attack than Western or Chinese solid-fueled ones, what this means is that Trident is now capable of wiping out Russia's entire ground-based strategic deterrent at extremely short notice. This has, it seems, quite possibly frightened Russian leadership, and is the likely reason why they have been desperately trying to devise new outlandish delivery vehicles, like an unmanned nuclear torpedo or a nuclear-powered cruise missile. This is further complicated by the fact that Russia has more or less completely lost its space-based ballistic missile warning network and does not seem to have the capability to replace it, which means that Russia must rely on land-based early warning radars to inform it of a nuclear strike. As a result, Russia will have as little as ten minutes of warning for an incoming nuclear attack, and will have essentially no idea what it will look like or what scale it is on. When Russian sources say they'll treat any ballistic missile strike as a nuclear attack, they probably aren't lying, because their sensor network is so bad they can't tell whether a sounding rocket is a nuclear first strike, and their survivability is so bad they can't afford to not launch.
There's also the interesting problem presented by the development of a new low-yield Trident warhead. While it might possibly have some use, many believe that low-yield nuclear weapons are dangerous because they blur the line between conventional and tactical nuclear war, and the use of Trident as a delivery vehicle runs a substantial risk on account of the fact that it may be difficult for an adversary [such as Russia] to discern that the vehicle is a tactical nuclear strike rather than the beginning of a strategic exchange. These same very concerns scuppered a conventional variant of Trident proposed for the Prompt Global Strike program, which would have used Trident to launch large conventional payloads, a bad idea for multiple reasons.
Arms agreements that defined the 1990s and 2000s have also begun to fall apart. The cancellation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was just the latest in what has been a slowly escalating trend since the 2002 expiration of the anti-ballistic missile treaty. The Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement, for instance, which required the US and Russia to convert their stockpiles of plutonium into MOX reactor fuel, is also dead, ostensibly for financial reasons on the part of the US, but quite possibly to allow the US to retain its 80+ tons of plutonium in a diluted form so it can be easily converted back into warheads [keep in mind only a few kilograms of plutonium is needed for a warhead so we're talking about thousands of devices in the several hundred kiloton range].
Why this is happening is an interesting question, and it seems that both the US and Russia [but, to be honest, mostly the US] are involved in the end of these arms restriction treaties. The first problem, and most obvious, is China. China has a general policy of not engaging in arms-limitation treaties, viewing them as a way for dominant powers to retain their position, and has a nuclear arms reduction policy that amounts to "get rid of all of your nukes and then we'll talk". With China becoming an increasingly significant threat to the United States, the arms controls placed on it by agreement with Russia have become problematic for American strategic planners. In particular, the limitation on intermediate-range forces was seen as a major difficulty given the increasingly capable conventionally armed intermediate range ballistic and cruise missiles that are one of the edges the PLAN holds; and, I suspect [but cannot prove] that planners within the US government view tactical nuclear war with China as a very real thing they should plan for, with the US using nukes first to gain a decisive tactical advantage and not escalating to a strategic exchange--this is enabled by the fact that China has essentially no tactical nuclear weapons, seems to believe it can avoid nuclear war with the United States [or possibly not--I've heard both], and a very small strategic stockpile of which only around 50 missiles can hit the continental US. Russia, on the other hand, has a rather different problem. Its conventional forces in Europe are inferior in quality and quantity to what NATO can field, so it has to plan to make up the difference with nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the increasing sophistication of American capabilities in ways which Russia simply cannot match means that the survivability of the Russian nuclear force is beginning to be called into question, and thus a larger arsenal is required to ensure that a strategic deterrent can be maintained as it has traditionally. As a result, both parties are abandoning arms treaties with, well, reckless abandon.
Finally, the development of increasingly capable ballistic missile defenses, especially by the United States--which now holds pretty much all the cards in the event of nuclear war--means that nations will be required to develop either new and more sophisticated delivery vehicles, or, alternatively, produce more warheads, to ensure that they can maintain deterrence. These include the SM-3 anti-ballistic missile, which can intercept ballistic missiles in the midcourse stage, though only shorter ranged ones and not full ICBMs at the moment, and which is being deployed by the US not only aboard its numerous destroyer fleet but also in "AEGIS Ashore" sites in Eastern Europe [which also caused concern by Russia because these units could easily fire ground-launched cruise missiles that were banned under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty], and were to be deployed in Japan before local opposition halted construction. The US also designed THAAD, or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, which provides an interceptor to destroy even ICBMs in the terminal stage, and has made significant improvements to the Patriot missile system which enhance its ABM capabilities. The US has also discussed reviving technologies from previously abandoned schemes such as the YAL-1, a 747 that aimed to shoot down ballistic missiles with lasers at a range of hundreds of kilometers [though it was suggested the new implementation be on a stealth drone] and even considered further research into space-based interceptors--which seem far more feasible in a day and age when private companies are already putting up constellations of advanced communications satellites in similar numbers to those proposed for the "Brilliant Pebbles" scheme.

7. Conclusion

As a result of these shifts, the current lull in nuclear war preparations and small nuclear arsenals of today may not last much longer. Indeed, to an extent, the lull has already ended.
Without a doubt Biden will try to negotiate a renewal of New START--he himself has stated his intent to do so multiple times, but the short time window he has in which to renew it [it expires on 5 February 2021, little more than a week after his inauguration] means that whether he will be successful is uncertain. Even if New START is renewed or brought back in a new form I would expect it to be much less restrictive and a de facto abandonment of the arms reduction that has characterized the last thirty years of nuclear policy. I also don't think that New START, even extended, will last past 2026--that's the point when major nuclear modernizations are set to begin to the US arsenal, including the introduction of the Columbia-class SSBN into service and replacement of the 1960s-era Minuteman III ICBM that constitutes the ground-based deterrent.
Both the US and Russia are poised to make major modernizations to their nuclear arsenals and I expect both of their stockpiles to grow barring a renewal of New START as presently constituted. I also expect that the US may well begin preparing to build new facilities for nuclear weapons production, as its old ones have pretty much all closed at this point. Nuclear weapons may also begin to see a return to the naval field, with nuclear-tipped anti-ship missiles and torpedoes possibly seeing revivals--watch for a return to the US's historic nuclear ambiguity policy on whether or not its ships carry nuclear weapons.
New forecasts say that China is poised to double its nuclear arsenal in the next decade, and I suspect these ones will actually turn out, because China knows that their arsenal at present is too small to pose an effective deterrent to tactical nuclear war and may, within a relatively short time, become an ineffective strategic deterrent.
The list of states with nuclear weapons is likely to grow--South Korea is a near sure bet for reasons I have described previously, but I would not be surprised to see more states get the bomb. Iran seems likely to build one unless stopped via force, and they've gotten quite close already. However, more than the number of states which will possess nuclear weapons outright will grow, I predict a major expansion in nations which attempt to reach a nuclear-latent state. The recent burst of smallsat launchers provides a perfect cover for ballistic missile systems to be developed; drone technology and electronics have made cruise missiles easier than ever to design, and nuclear power will be sought after by a large number of states with potentially ulterior motives--once a sufficient stockpile of used fuel is made reprocessing it to extract the plutonium within is relatively trivial, and I expect more states to push for reprocessing technology and "full control over the nuclear fuel-cycle". As a result, strategic planners may ultimately have to reckon with a world in which most nations [or far more than the 9 current nuclear-armed states] could well develop modest nuclear arsenals within a few months to a few years.
As for what the US should do--well, my opinion is that the US should just embrace the inevitable. During the Cold War, the US saw that France wasn't going to be stopped from building the bomb--so instead they helped the French build their weapons and thus gained the trust and friendship of the entire French strategic community, at least to an extent where their nuclear and even conventional forces were de facto reintegrated into NATO.
That has lessons for today, I think. If something is going to happen one way or another, the US should just embrace it and try to help the process along and gain the trust and friendship of the nation involved, provided such a move is not directly contrary to American interests. For instance, take South Korea. If it becomes clear that South Korea intends to build nuclear weapons, the US would be better off discretely enabling that by amending its Section 123 agreement and clandestinely supporting the program than trying to fight it.
The US should also seriously reconsider whether it should maintain a non-proliferation stance, although I can see strong cases on both sides. Non-proliferation has failed to stop Pakistan or North Korea, and at that point it's really rather questionable whether it works, but for the moment it's the only thing that's holding the Middle East and world as a whole back from a nuclear arms race. If Iran does get the bomb, I doubt that the US will continue to hold onto that position. At that point [or this point] most of the nations the US doesn't want to have the bomb either already have it, cannot be stopped from getting it without war, or just flat out can't build it due to lack of money, will, and resources. It's unlikely that the US will openly support proliferation, especially Congress, but I find it quite probable that the US may well take a "wink-and-a-nudge" approach to the whole issue. A Section 123 Agreement might be amended to allow reprocessing and a solid-fuelled smallsat launcher sold or authorized, but how was the US government to know that the nation was pursuing nuclear weapons?
Furthermore, the US should start preparing as if an all-out nuclear arms race may resume, because it may well do so. Developing a new comprehensive ballistic missile defense strategy is part of this, possibly including Brilliant Pebbles--I'm a strong advocate of at least researching the solution especially given that so many hurdles already have been met by private companies like SpaceX--but also terminal defenses and directed-energy weapons. The US should also begin thoroughly examining the use of nuclear weapons in a modern context and prepare facilities needed for the production of additional warheads, including possibly a lithium-separation site to manufacture additional tritium, as well as reprocessing sites to produce additional plutonium.
[citations in comments due to max character limit]

hi, you're on a rock floating in space. pretty cool, huh? some of it's water. fuck it. actually, most of it's water. i can't even get from here to there without buying a boat. it's sad. i'm sad. i miss you. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? a long time ago... actually, never. and also now. nothing is nowhere. when? never. makes sense, right? like i said, it didn't happen. nothing was never anywhere. that's why it's been everywhere. it's been so "everywhere," you don't need a "where." you don't even need a "when." that's how "every" it gets. forget this. i wanna be something. go somewhere. do something. i want things to change. i want to invent time and space. and i know it's possible because everything is here, and it probably already happened. i just don't know when to start. and that's exactly where it started. big bang— pause woah. i paused it. i think there's a universe now. what's it made of? quarks and stuff. ah, that's a thing! in a place! don't like it? try a new place, at a different Time™. try to stick together, because the world is gonna get bigger and emptier. but it's not empty yet! it's still very full, and about a kjghpillion degrees. about no seconds later great news! the quarks are now happily married in groups of three, called a "proton" and a "neutron." and there's something else flying around that wants to join in, but can't cause it's too HOT. ten minutes later great news! the protons and neutrons are now happily married to each other! some of them even doubled up. about 380,000 years later great news! the electrons have now joined in. congratulations! the world is now... a bunch of gas in space. but it's getting closer together... ten million years later and it's getting closer together... 500 million years later and it's getting closer togeth—star is born it's a star new shit just got made! some stars burn out and die. bigger stars burn out and die with passion! and make some brand new way crazier shit. space dust! which allows for newer and more interesting stars to be made, and then die and explode into even crazier space dust! so now, stars have cool stuff around them, like rocks, ice, and funny clouds, which can make some very interesting things. like this ball of flaming rocks, for example. meteor hits earth holy shit, we just got hit by another ball of flaming rocks. and it kind of... made a mess. which is now the moon weather update: it's raining rocks from outer space. weather update: those rocks might've had water inside of them and now there's hot steam in the sky. weather update: cooler temperatures today and the floor is no longer lava. weather update... it's raining. severe flooding alert, the entire world is now an ocean. volcano alert. that's land! there'slifeintheocean what? something's alive in the ocean oh, cool. like a plant, or an animal? no! a microscopic speck. it lives in the bottom of the ocean and eats chemical soup, which is being served hot and fresh, made from gnarly space ingredients left over from when it was raining rocks or whatever. microscopic speck asexually reproduces oh yeah, and it can do that. reproduces three more times it has secret instructions written inside itself telling it how to build another one of itself. so that's pretty nifty, i would say. tired of living at the bottom of the ocean? now you can eat sunlight! using a revolutionary technique, you can convert sunlight into food. taste the sun! side effect, now there's oxygen everywhere and the sky is blue. then the earth might've been a snowball for a while. maybe even a couple of times. it's a sponge... it's a plant... it's a worm, and some other types of weird strange water bugs and strange fish. it's the Cambrian explosion: "wow, that's animals and stuff" but we're still in the ocean. hey, can we go on land? NO why? the sun is a deadly laser oh okay. not anymore, there's a blanket now the animals can go on land. come on, animals, let's go on land! "nope, can't walk yet." "and there's no food yet, so i don't care." 100 million years later okay, will you learn to walk if there's plants up here? "maybe," said some bugs. and fish. fish gasps for air five million years later okay, so i can go on land, but i have to go back in the water to have babies! idea: learn to use an egg. "i was already doing that" use a stronger egg. put water in it. have a baby, on land, in an egg. water is in the egg. baby, in the egg, in the water, in the egg. works for me. bye bye ocean 50 million years later and now everything's huge. including bugs. wanna see a map of the land? sure. Permian extinction oh, fuck, now everything's dead. just kidding, here are the survivors. keep your eye on this one, because it's about to become 75 million years later the dinosaurs. here's another map of the land. yeah, it broke apart. don't worry about it, it does that all the time. here comes a meteor. meteor strikes and the dinosaurs are gone it's mammal time, here come the mammals. look at those breasts. now they're gonna dominate the world, but one of them just learned how to grab stuff. and walk. no, like, walk like that. and grab stuff at the same time. and bang rocks together to make pointed rocks. "ouch" and set things on fire. "yeouch" and make crazy sounds with their voice: "gneurshk" which can mean different things. that's a human person! and now they're everywhere. almost. ice age! what? you can walk over here? cool. not anymore well i guess we're stuck here now. let's review: there's people on the planet. and they're chasing their food. fuck it. time to plant some grass. look at this. i get to control the food now. now everyone will want to be my friend and live near me. let's all build houses, except mine is bigger because i own the food. this is great! i wonder if anyone else is doing this. tired of using rocks for everything? use metal. it's underground. better farming was just invented in a sweet dank valley right in between these two rivers, and the animals are helping. guess what happens next? more food. and more people, who came to buy the food. now you need people to help make the food and keep track of the sales. and now you need houses for people to live in and people to make the houses and now there's more people and they invent things which makes things better and more people come and there's more farming and more people to make more things for more people and now there's business, money, writing, laws, power, Society coming soon to a dank river valley near you. meanwhile, out in the middle of nowhere, the horse is probably being tamed. why is all my metal so lame and lumpy? tired of using lame, sad metal? introducing: bronze. made from special ingredient tin from the far lands of Tin Land. i dunno, my dealer won't tell me where he gets it. also, guess what? egypt meanwhile, out in the middle of nowhere, they figured out how to put wheels on a horse. now we're getting somewhere. also, china and did i mention indus river valley civilization society count: 5 ... norte chico the middle east is getting more complicated. maybe because it's in the middle of the east. knock knock, er, clop clop. it's the... people with the horses? and they made an empire. and then everyone else copied their horses. greeks! ah look, it must be the greeks! er, a beta version of the greeks. let's check in with the indus river valley civilization: they're gone. guess who's not gone? china. new arrivals from india... maybe it's those horse people i was talking about... or their cousins or something... and they wrote some hymns and mantras and stuff... you could make a religion out of this. there's the bronze age collapse. now the phoenicians can get down to business also, can we switch to a metal that's a little easier to find? thanks. look who came back to israel, it's the twelve tribes of israel. and they believe in God just one though, and he's got like a ten-step program. here's some huge heads. must be the olmecs. the phoenicians make some colonies. the greeks copy their idea and make some colonies. the phoenicians made a colony so big it makes colonies. here comes the assyrian empire. never mind, it's the babyloni— media—it's the Persian Empire: "wow, that's big" enlightenment ah, the buddha was just enlightened. who's the buddha? this guy, who sat under a tree for so long that he figured out how to ignore the fact that we're all dying. you could make a religion out of this. oops, china just broke. but while it was breaking, confucius was figuring out how to have good morals. enlightenment ah, the greeks just had the idea of thinking about stuff. and right over here, alexander just had the idea of conquering the entire persian empire. it's a great idea. he was... great. and now he's dead. hopefully, the rest of the gang will be able to share the empire evenly between them. knock knock, it's chandragupta. he says "get the hell out of here. will you get the hell out of here if i give you 500 elephants? okay, thanks, bye" time to conquer all of india er most of india but what about this part? that's the tamil kings. no one conquers the tamil kings. who are the tamil kings? merchants, probably. and they've got spices! who would like to buy the spices? "me!" said the arabians, swiftly buying it and selling it to the rest of the world. hey, china put itself back together again, with good morals as their main philosophy. actually, they have three main philosophies: confucianism: have good morals taoism: go with the flow legalism: fuck you, obey the law out here, the horse nomads run wild and free, and they would like to ransack your city. nomads ransack china let's check the greekification levels of the greekified kingdoms: greekification overload. bye, said the parthians. bye, said the jews. hi, said the parthians, taking over the entire place. heyyyyy, said the romans, eating the entire mediterranean for breakfast. "thanks for invading our homeland," said the jews, who were starting to get tired of people invading their homeland. "hi, everything's great," said some guy who seems to be getting very popular and is then arrested and killed for being too popular, which actually makes him more popular. you could make a religion out of this. want silk? now you can buy it from china. they just made a brand new road to the world. conquers vietnam or you can get there on water "sick! new trade routes!" said india, accidentally spreading their religion to the entire southeast. hmm, that's a good place for an epic trading kingdom. there goes buddhism, travelling up the silk road. i wonder if it'll reach china before it collapses again. remember the persian empire? yep, said the persians, making a new one. axum is getting so powerful, they would like to build a long stick. has anyone populated madagascar yet? let's do it together. china is whole again... ...then it broke again still can't cross the sahara desert? try camels. "hell yeah! now we've got business," said the ghana empire, selling lots of gold. and slaves. "hi, i'm a member of the roman empire, and i was wondering is loving jesus legal yet?" "no" "actually, okay sure," said constantine, moving the capital way over here to be closer to his main rival. don't worry about rome, it won't fall. it's the golden age of india there's the gupta empire, not chandragupta, just gupta. first name chandra. the first. guess who's in rome? barbarians. what's a barbarian? "non-romans," said the romans, being invaded by non-romans. r.i.p. roman empire. actually just half of it, the other half is just fine, but it's not in rome anymore, so let's give it a new name. the mayans have figured out the stars oh, and here's a huge city, population: everyone. the göktürks have taken over the entire eurasian steppe. great job, göktürks. how's india? broken. how's china? back together. how's those trading kingdoms? bigger, and there's more of them. korea has three kingdoms. japan has a kingdom, it's the sunrise kingdom. intermission deep in the arabian desert, on the top of a mountain, the real god whispers in muhammad's ear. so, he goes down to the cube where everyone worships gods and he tells them their gods are all fake. and everyone got so mad at him that he had to leave town and go to a different town. you could make a religion out of this, and maybe conquer the world as well. the roman empire is long gone, but somehow the pope is still the pope. plus, there's new kingdoms all over europe. i wonder if there's room for moors. here's all the wisdom. in a house. it's the baghdad house of wisdom! just in time for the islamic golden age! "let's bring stuff to the coast and sell it, and become the swahili on the swahili coast," said the swahili on the swahili coast. remember this tiny space you have to go through to get from here to there? someone owns that now. wanna get enlightened in the middle of nowhere? the franks have the biggest kingdom in europe, and the pope is so proud that he invites the king over for christmas. "surprise! you're the new roman emporer!" said the pope, pretending to still be part of the roman empire. then the franks broke their kingdom into what will later be called france and not-france. the northerners, er, just "norse" if you don't have much time, are exploring. they go north, from the north to the northern north. and they find some land— two types of land!— and they name them accordingly. prankd they also invade some other places and get called many names, such as "vikings." there's the rus! the kievan rus! are they vikings? "i don't think so," said the kievan rus. okay, fair enough. the pope is ready to make some more emperors of the roman empire. the holy roman empire! it's actually germany, but don't worry about it. new kingdoms—CRISTIANIZE ALL THE KINGDOMS!! which brand would you like? "mine's better" "mine's better" "mine's better" "time to conquer england," said william. it's a bird! it's a plane! it's the seljuk turks! "aah!" said the byzantine empire, who's getting so small and almost doesn't exist anymore. "we need help!" they need help! so they call the pope. "hey pope, can you help us get rid of the seljuks? maybe take back the holy land on the way? come on, i know you want to take back the holy land." "yes, i do actually want to do that. let's do a crusade." crusade! they did many crusades. some of which almost didn't fail. but at least the italians got some sweet trade deals. goodbye mayans. hello toltecs! goodbye toltecs. hello mississippi! look at those mounds. there's the pueblo. i always wondered how to build a town in a cliff. guess who's here? khmer. where? here! and pagan is there. vietnam unconquered itself, korea just became itself, and japan is so addicted to art that the military might have to take over the government. china just invented bombs, and typing. and the mongols just invaded most of the universe. nice going, genghis! i bet that will last a long time. some of the islamic turks were unaffected by the mongol invasions because they were busy invading india. is it tonga time? i think it's tonga time. i just figured out where the swahili gets all of their gold. look at this chad! it means "lake." there's an empire there! right in the middle of africa! the king of mali is so rich, he's going on tour to let everyone know. "wow, that guy's rich," everyone said. the christians are doing a great job reconquering iberia, which will soon be called spain and not-spain. please remain christian. we will check in later to see if you're still christian when you least expect. whoops, half of europe just died. ming! china's back, yay! hey, khmer. time to share. new kingdoms, here and there. oh, look who controls all of the islands. it's the mahajapit. majahapit. mapajahit. mahapajit. mapajahit. ma-ja-pa-hit? oh, italy's real rich. time for them to care a lot about art and the ancient classics. it's kinda like a rebirth. here's a printer. let's make books! so you think you can conquer the byzantine empire? yep, said the ottoman turks. nice job, ottoman turks. oops, you missed a spot. don't forget to ban europe from the indian spice trade. "what? that's bullshit," said portugal, spiceless. "well i guess we'll have to find another way to india" "wait!" said christopher columbus, probably smoking crack. "if the world is round, let's go this way to india." "nah, don't worry, we already got this," said portugal. so chris goes to spain. "hey spain, wanna hire me to find india by going around back of the world?" "no" "please?" "no" "please?" "wtf" "no" "please?" "...okay" so he sails into the ocean, and discovers... more ocean. and then discovers the indies, and japan! let's draw a line to decide who gets which half of the world. the aztec and the inca empires are off to a great start. i wonder if they know that europe just discovered their continent. the hapsburgs are marrying into so many royal families, they might have to start marrying each other. move over, lithuania, here comes moscow. ivan wants to make russia great again. move over, timurids, maybe go invade india or something. persia just made persia persian again. let's make it the other kind of islam. the one where we thought the first guy should've been the other guy. hey, christians! do you sin? now you can buy your way out of hell! "that's bullshit. this whole thing is bullshit. that's a scam. fuck the church. here's 95 reasons why," said martin luther, in his new book which might have accidentally started the protestant reformation. "you know what would be magnificent?" said suleiman wearing an onion hat. "what if the ottoman empire was... really big?" which it is now. "what if russia was big?" said ivan, trying not to be terrible. portugal had a dream that they controlled the entire indian ocean, including the spice trade. and then that dream was real. and spain realized that this is not india, but they pillaged it anyway. "damn," said england and france. "we gotta start pillaging some stuff." then the dutch revolt, and all the hipsters moved to amsterdam. "damn," said amsterdam. "we gotta start pillaging some stuff." question one: can you get to india from north america? no, but at least there's beaver. question two: steal the spice trade. that's not a question, but the dutch did it anyway. and sugar... guess where all of the sugar is made? in brazil! stolen! in the caribbean! and it's so goddamn profitable, you might forget to not do slavery. the next thing on russia's to-do list is to get bigger. britain and france are having a friendly discussion about who should control the entire world. more specifically, ohio. then it escalates into a seven-year discussion, giving prussia a chance to show austria who's boss. but what about britain and france, did they figure out who's boss? yes they did! it's britain. guess who's broke? also britain! so they start taxing the hell out of america. "fuck you!" says america, declaring their independence and fighting for it, and france helps them win. now france is broke, and britain will have to send their prisoners to a different continent. wait, if france is broke, why do the king and queen still wear such fancy dresses? "let's overthrow the palace and cut all their heads off!" said robespierre, cutting everybody's heads off until someone eventually got mad and cut his head off. you could make a rel— no, don't. haiti is starting to like the idea of a revolution, especially the slaves, who free themselves by killing their masters. "why didn't we think of this before?" wait, who's in charge of france now? "me," said napoleon, trying to take over europe. luckily, they banished him to an island. but he came back! luckily, they banished him to another island. there goes latin america, becoming independent in the latin american wars of independence. britain just figured out how to turn steam into power, so now they can make many different types of machines and factories with machines in them so they can make a lot of products real fast. then they invent some trains. and conquer india and maybe put some trains there. "hey, china!" said britain. "buy stuff from us!" "nah, dude, we already got everything," says china. so britain tried to get them addicted to opium, which worked, actually. but then china made it illegal and dumped it all into the sea. so britain threw a hissy fit and made them open up five cities and give them an island. britain and russia are playing a game where they try to stop the other person from conquering afghanistan. also, the sultan of oman lives in zanzibar now: "that's just where he lives." india just had a revolution, and they would like to govern themselves now. "nope," said britain, governing them even harder than before. incoming telegram: HI I JUST SENT YOU A MESSAGE THRU A WIRE technology is about to go crazy! the united states finally figured out whether slavery is good or bad. it's bad, they decided, and then they continued manifesting their destiny, which is to kill the rest of the natives and take their land and maybe kick out the mexicans too. "i know! let's rape africa!" said europe, scrambling to see who could rape it the fastest. they never got ethiopia... britain and france are still hungry. they never got thailand... the united states ran out of destiny to manifest, so they're looking for more: hawaii! cuba! wait, spain controls cuba. well, blame something on them and go to war! what should we blame on spain? u.s.s. maine sinks "let's blame the maine on spain." so they blame the maine on spain. now we're in business. to celebrate, they kick panama out of panama and make a canal, connecting the two oceans. britain just found oil in the middle east. it makes cars go... china is so tired of being bossed around that they delete their old government and make a new, stronger government, which is accidentally weaker and is controlled by a guy from the previous government. europe hasn't had a war since the last war, so they start world war one. look at those guns! it's gonna be a great war, so great we won't need a second one. after it's over, they blame germany. russia went on strike, and the workers overthrew the government. now, everyone's paycheck is the same. communism in the soviet union... the arabs revolt and britain helps. now the ottoman empire is gone, so we can give the jewish people a place to live. hopefully the arabs won't mind. "let's cut the cake!" said sykes and picot, carving up the remains of the not-so-ottoman-anymore-empire. except turkey! turkey makes a brand new turkey! and then the saudis conquer arabia. it just seemed like the right thing to do. phone rings hello? yes, it's the 1920's calling. let's get to a car and drive to a party and listen to jazz on the radio and go to the movies. the economy is great and it will probably be great forever. just kidding. germany's back, featuring hitler, the angry mustache model, and he's mad at the jews for existing. japan is finally conquering the east, and they're so excited, they rape nanking way too hard. they should probably just deny it. hitler's out of control, so the international community tackles him and tries to explain to him why killing all of the jews is a bad idea. but he kills himself because they could explain it to him. that's world war two! bonus round! pacific showdown united states vs. japan FIGHT!! united states drops two extinction balls on japan FINISH HIM! let's unite all the nations and have some world peace! seems legit. "hi, im gandhi, and if britain doesn't get the hell out of india, i'm going to starve myself in public." britain leaves "wow, that worked?" bonus! now there's pakistan. actually two pakistans, one of them can be bangladesh later. the jews and the arabs finally figured out which one of them should live in the holy land. "me!" they both said at the same time. let's divide up the lands so we're both happy. SIKE! they both get angrier! look out, china! there's a new china in china. what's on the menu? communism! no thanks, said the other china, escaping to an island. i wonder which one is the real china...? there's the korean war. korea versus korea! nobody wins, then its on pause forever. let's meet the sponsors. oh, it's the two global superpowers. they're having a friendly debate over which economic system is good and which one is an evil virus of satan. and they both have atom bombs. FIGHT!! wait, no, that would be the end of the world. let's just keep it cool and spy on each other instead. and make sure we have enough atom bombs. "i'll race you to space." united states plants a flag on the moon now let's make more countries fight themselves. europe is tired of pillaging other continents, and the continents they were pillaging are tired of being pillaged. so here's a new map with new countries. now you can't tell who they're being pillaged by. the united states finally decided whether racism is good or bad. they decided it's bad, and the world agrees. south africa might need another minute to think about it. let's check the world population! woah. okay. technology is better too, that might keep happening. the soviet union decides to relax a little, and accidentally falls apart. europe makes a union, so now they can all use the same money. except britain, because they don't feel like it. let's check the mail... surprise! it's on the computer! whoops, someone just attacked america. i bet they'll remember that. phone call! surprise! it's in your pocket! wanna learn everything? surprise! it's on the computer! now your phone's a computer, which is in your pocket! whoops, the economy just crashed. don't worry, the big banks won't fail, because they're not supposed to. surprise!... flying robots. with bombs. wanna print a brain? some people have no friends. some people have no food. the globe is warming, and the ocean is full of plastic! "let's save the planet!" said everybody, not knowing how. "let's invent a thing inventor," said the thing inventor inventor after being invented by a thing inventor. that's pretty cool. by the way, where the hell are we? thanks for watching history i hope i mentioned everything

The best laid PLANs of mice and men often go awry.
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Welcome back to another effortpost by me generally on the developing arms race in East Asia, this time covering the People's Liberation Army Navy, hereafter referred to as the "PLAN", and its massive growth... and... mostly, well, its massive growth. What that means is mostly covered in other posts about how other countries are responding to it. The why is a bit difficult because, well, China is not well known for open debate, or open anything, really, which will turn up repeatedly.
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1. What you [might] need to know about South Korea's ludicrous arms buildup
2. We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches.... uh, what do we do after that again?: The Perilous Defensive Position of Taiwan
3. "You've hit another cargo ship? The Problems with the US Navy: Not all of them begin with "Seven" and end with "th Fleet"."
4. Will China's PLAN survive contact with the enemy?
5. Biden's New START and modern nuclear war
6. First And Last Stand Of The Tin Can Navies [ASEAN + Australia and the smaller adversaries China may contend with]
7. Boned: Problems in the US Air [and space!] Force
8. --Unnamed-- effortpost on Japanese military matters, mostly about how weird the JSDF status is
9. --Unnamed--effortpost on Indian military matters, and why they can't focus on China or buy anything that works
10. --Unnamed--effortpost on the rest of the PLA, mostly the air force though
11. --Unnamed--effortpost on the rest of the US Armed Forces, mostly talking about how the marines are changing and the Army's new love affair with INF-busting weapons
12. Conclusion?

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Glossary:
PLA = People's Liberation Army = the armed forces of the People's Republic of China, or China
PLAN = People's Liberation Army Navy = the naval forces of the PLA
PLANAF = People's Liberation Army Navy Air Force = the air force of the navy of the PLA
Ashm = Anti-ship missile, cruise missile unless specifically described as otherwise--there's only one anti-ship ballistic missile in existence and its efficacy and whether or not it functions is questionable
CIWS = close-in weapons system, like the Phalanx gun or Goalkeeper
VLS = vertical launch system for missiles
AEGIS = Aegis Combat System if described specifically in that context, a US naval warfare system, but we'll usually be talking about "Chinese AEGIS", which is a nomiker used by the Chinese media in particular comparing the Type 346 radar to the AN-SPY family, with which it shares numerous technical characteristics--but how comparable the "Chinese AEGIS" system is to what the US uses is a complete unknown.
SAM = Surface-to-air missile, in this case usually a S-300 derivative
First Island Chain = The islands, stretching from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan, which keep China inside its littoral seas much as the GIUK [Greenland-Iceland-UK] gap has kept various continental powers out of the Atlantic.
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Some PLAN equipment you might see described--the nomenclature is confusing and a relic of the cultural revolution, and as a result China now has more Types than the British.
Type 003 = China's new conventionally powered supercarriers, currently under construction
Type 002 = China's first truly "operational" carrier
Type 001 = China's first carrier, built on a Soviet hull purchased from Ukraine ostensibly to make a floating casino
Type 055 = Guided-missile cruiser, though generally called a destroyer it's probably more descriptively labeled a cruiser
Type 052D = Guided-missile destroyer using "Chinese AEGIS"
Type 052/051B/052B/052C = the gradual progression of evolving Chinese naval tech, largely built as practice/demo ships like the Type 001. Some of the earlier ones are steam-powered but by the Type 052C you have something almost as advanced as the Type 052D, albeit with turbine problems
Type 054A = the standard modern frigate of the PLAN
Type 053[anything] = old PLAN frigates
Type 096 = China's newest SSBN class, under construction
Type 094 = China's first functional SSBN class, very noisy
Type 092 = China's first "SSBN", believed to have never left port with an actual nuke on board
Type 095 = China's newest SSN class, under construction
Type 093 = China's current SSN class, noisy
Type 091 = China's first SSN class, dumb dumb dumb and is at a 1950s tech level
Type 039[A] = China's new SSK class
Kilo = China's older SSK class, imported from Russia
Sovremenny = China's first capable anti-air destroyers, imported from Russia
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1. The Last Time A Rising Navy Challenged A Dominant Foe

The last time we've seen something like this was in the late 19th century. After the First World War shipbuilding was restricted by the landmark Washington Naval Treaty, one of the first great arms control treaties, and during the Cold War the Soviet Union never really had any hopes of surpassing American naval power. China, however, seems intent on replacing the US as the world's dominant naval power, or at least building a force that can stop the US Navy, even combined with the forces of Japan and other regional allies.
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The nations in question, of course, in the last naval arms race, were the United Kingdom and a newly-unified Germany. Germany never reached the level of the UK, but seriously threatened it. Previously the UK had maintained a policy of having more ships than the next two largest fleets combined, but this was no longer possible, and the UK legitimately was fearful for its naval supremacy. It didn't last too long in the end--under a decade--and a resumption was foiled by first a world war and then the Washington Naval Treaty. The impact of the arms race, though, was massive. It set Germany and the UK at odds with each other, it resulted in a general buildup of warships pretty much everywhere [South America was, believe it or not, one of the biggest offenders there], established Germany for a time as the world's second naval power, having eclipsed both France and Russia and turning a small coastal defense navy into something that was able to defeat the Royal Navy itself, though never comprehensively enough to change the course of the first world war.
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China dwells in a much different situation than Germany did at the turn of the last century, so we can only extend the analogy so far--substituting in Japan for the UK, India for Russia, and so on is possible but not, in my view, educational. However, we can see many of the same elements playing in here. China seems intent on replacing the US as a dominant power, or at least as regional hegemon--the ancient tributary system seems to lie fairly heavily on Chinese minds--and in order to do that, it must be able to have some degree of power projection and the capability to deny the US Navy access to areas within the first island chain. It remains to be seen, however, how successful that quest will be. Much as with the dreadnought battleships, I wouldn't be surprised if we never actually do find out if most of the shiny naval toys people have built actually work. But their mere existence shows the mutual hostility developing in the region and demonstrates the size of the Chinese threat.
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Another lesson learned here is that China, like Germany, may not develop a naval force capable of defeating the US comprehensively, but only partially, and that one of the powers--in this case, China--might be pressured to strike first before the US Navy can close the gap. That ~2030 gap I talked about in my last post is, I think, an especially vulnerable point, because China may look at a degraded, but rejuvenating US Navy, then at their own capable forces, and decide to strike then in Taiwan and the South China Sea, only to back down when the US Navy again eclipses them. Whether or not that will happen, we will see--but I find it a very dangerous and perhaps likely possibility.
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2. What the PLAN looked like 20 years ago

The PLAN has undergone an absolutely stunning evolution in the past two decades. In the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis the US could intimidate China with a pair of aircraft carrier strike groups and China could do pretty much nothing about it. Now the US is afraid of sending anything more than a destroyer through the strait.
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Twenty years ago, the PLAN was a bit of a joke. Even Taiwan figured it could hold the seas against the PLAN. It consisted of a few tens of outdated coastal-defense frigates, some Soviet-era diesel-electric subs, and a large number of unsophisticated missile craft. The pride of the Chinese fleet were a handful of destroyers assembled using cobbled-together Western technology--copied French missiles, American gas turbines, the lot. According to American accounts at the time, the instructions for the equipment hadn't even been translated. The most advanced ship in the fleet used steampower. There were nuclear submarines, but of 1950s quality. Of particular note was the fact that the Chinese fleet had no area air defense capabilities--their premier surface-to-air-missile was an unlicensed knockoff of the French Crotale, and couldn't shoot anything outside of visual range, at high altitudes, or really doing anything more sophisticated than trying to kill their ships with low-altitude dumb bombing runs.
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In the past twenty years, however, the PLAN has, much like the German Navy towards the end of the 19th century, gone from an afterthought to the world's second most powerful force. It began, as modern China's military capabilities almost all began, with the looting of the former Soviet Union for naval technology. While Soviet naval tech was generally lacking, it was much better than anything else China could get its hands on after the arms embargo placed on it in the 1990s by the US and Europe in response to Tienanmen and the end of the Cold War. China bought Soviet diesel submarines, Soviet air-defense destroyers, and Soviet aircraft carriers, which it promptly left lying around [and turned one of them into a theme park]. This was combined with copies of various pieces of Western, mostly European, technology for everything from sonars to surface-to-air missiles. China then began developing its first modern indigenous surface combatants, the Type 052C, but there were still problems. The engines were Ukrainian and had reliability trouble, the gun jammed, there was no VLS.
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It is really in the last ten years that things have begun to move extremely quickly, and even only in the latter portion of the decade. In 2012 the Type 001 Liaoning entered service, and although it remains more of a training ship than an operational vessel, and is held back by a poor carrier aircraft, the mere fact that China "built" a carrier was a surprise to many. In 2014 the first Type 052D destroyer came online. It had learned the lessons from the Type 052C, and in just the last six years at least ten have entered service, with a class size of about 23 expected. This rapid expansion is what has frightened competing navies the most--in a little over a decade, the PLAN is constructing more destroyers than the British, French, and Australian navies have in service combined. It is also building the Type 055, which has generally been called a "destroyer" despite being more aptly described as a cruiser in line with the Ticonderoga-class. China has also built 30 modern frigates in the past decade, which has also swelled its numbers, along with numerous smaller corvettes, submarines, and so on.
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This is why the PLAN has become such an object of concern. While it cannot challenge the US Navy yet, at least outside its littoral zones, the decline of the USN and rapid expansion of the PLAN means that it is a serious threat. And the speed at which it has developed has made many fearful. As recently as 2010, the idea of China operating an aircraft carrier or modern destroyers seemed distant, possibly preposterous. Now China speaks openly of having a six-carrier fleet in the 2030s, although, as with many of China's plans to operate full US-replicated tech and doctrine, these may have somewhat caved to realism. China is mighty, but it has already done the easy part--the last part is much harder, in economics and in military matters. Building the software, the institutional knowledge, the hardware to compete with the US Navy will prove difficult.
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3. What the PLAN looks like now--submarines

Submarines are one of the PLAN's weak spots, particularly nuclear submarines. China is, however, making some fairly rapid advances in this area.
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Their nuclear submarine program has been considered a bit of a joke for some time. In the late 1950s when all the cool kids great powers were getting nuclear submarines, China decided [or at least Mao did] that China needed nuclear submarines too. About 16 years later, the product of this effort finally emerged as the Type 091 submarine. Based on 1950s technology, with poor radiation shielding and basically nothing done in the name of noise reduction, and not even a teardrop hull, the Type 091 was probably more of a threat to the sailors who were on it than anyone else, except maybe the two Tench-class submarines that Taiwan operates, which use 1940s technology and are the world's longest-serving submarines, though they're mostly used for training nowadays. Even then, my money would be on the Tench despite the upgrades the PLAN has made to the Type 091. There's only so much you can do to put lipstick on a pig.
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China also produced an SSBN, the Type 092, which was probably the only submarine more useless than the Type 091. About the only useful thing it did for the PLAN was that it served as a test platform for SLBM launches. Reports suggest that the Type 092 is the noisiest SSBN ever made, and is thought to have only ever undertaken a single patrol. It stayed at port for so long that it was thought to have sunk in an accident. And the experience turned the PLAN off from building SSBNs for over twenty years, until the Type 094 came online in 2007.
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More recent submarines are growing in capability, though. The Type 094 is not the noisiest SSBN ever made, and may not even be the noisiest in current service--that honor going to the Delta III operated by the Russian Navy, which uses 1970s technology, and, which, according to the US Office of Naval Intelligence, is about as noisy as the Type 094. The Type 093 is also moderately capable--it actually functions and can fire anti-ship missiles. However, the Type 093 is still considered only comparable to the Soviet Victor III class, again using 1970s technology. Future submarines have not yet been seen, but expectations are that China will make another step forward to late 1980s or early 1990s tech levels, producing something on par with the Los Angeles or Akula for the first time.
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China also operates a fairly capable fleet of coastal diesel-electric submarines. While some are quite old--the Type 035--most are pretty average for the global submarine force, a mix of Kilos and domestic AIP designs. The large number of boats in operation and their anti-ship missile capability means that these should be considered a real threat, at least in the littoral waters near to China, but they aren't decisive by any means, especially since China is facing off against such threats as Japan's Soryu class, probably the most advanced diesel-electric sub in existence.
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In conclusion, the PLAN is still pretty weak on the submarine front--weaker here than on anything but its carrier force, but its capabilities are advancing rapidly and should not be underestimated.

4. What the PLAN looks like now--surface combatants

The surface fleet is definitely the most impressive and capable portion of the PLAN, no questions about it. China once had a fleet consisting mostly of coastal frigates and missile boats. As recently as 2000, its fleet had no real area-air-defense destroyers, and no SAMs that could operate outside visual range. Now, though, the PLAN operates tens of advanced guided-missile destroyers, advanced frigates, and still retains a large number of small, stealthy missile boats.
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The major focus of Chinese warships appears to be on anti-air, with anti-surface being a somewhat secondary concern for all but the smallest vessels. This makes sense when you realize that the primary focus is, at least for the moment, on using land-based aircraft to strike against hostile fleet formations using long-range anti-ship missiles, in a very Soviet sort of way--"Backfire raids" using long-range land-based aircraft with anti-ship missiles were one of the US Navy's major concerns during the Cold War, and the very reason for the F-14's existence along with the AIM-54 Phoenix it carried. However, China has been developing anti-surface capabilities as well using ashms and land-attack cruise missiles [generally the same thing, actually]. Since China has finally developed a VLS system that allows it to use the same launcher for multiple missiles, its most recent ships have become more versatile in that role.
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How effective these ships are at that task is, however, a relatively open question. Their radars at least seem to quite sophisticated, using flat-panel AESA, and have been dubbed "Chinese AEGIS" by the highly reliable Chinese domestic media. The basic platform their surface-to-air missiles are based on also seems to be fairly capable--the HQ-9 is an S-300 derivative, a respectable SAM system though, again, how capable it is against opponents in an active electronic warfare environment is questionable, and it has basically no capabilities against stealth aircraft like the F-35 as far as anyone knows. The efficacy of their CIWS, again, is open to question. Really this is true of everything about the modern PLAN, and PLA in general. The PLA is secretive, has not exported most of its hardware, and has developed largely independently of foreign militaries, though it is definitely influenced by them. Now that the PLAN has moved away from simply copying foreign hardware and patching it together, its capabilities are much harder to discern.
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However, they should be taken as a very real threat, and not written off. My guess would be that their warships are about as capable as most of their non-American counterparts, save those equipped with AEGIS, but that's all my guess is---a guess.

5. What the PLAN looks like now--carriers

The PLAN currently has two carriers in service, and two more known to be under construction, and most suspect that it will build several more. However, at the moment, the PLAN's carrier force is largely a paper tiger, designed around training. The first carrier, the Type 001, basically was a "how do you build a carrier" kit bought from Russia, possibly by accident--the "fully functional" Minsk ended up as a theme park, believe it or not. The hull was purchased from Ukraine and then completed in China years later. It is also believed that the PLAN may have learned some things about aircraft carriers from the HMAS Melbourne, which was sold to a Chinese firm for scrapping--rumor has it the PLAN had no clue this had happened and then had a field day looking at all the stuff that hadn't been taken out. This was back in the old days when nobody could imagine that China would have an aircraft carrier. The Type 002, however, is built from scratch, but isn't particularly capable especially as it's a ski-jump carrier, leaving the Type 003 the first carrier which will prove actually useful.
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The main thing holding China's carrier fleet back, though, is a lack of a suitable aircraft. Originally China was considering purchasing Su-33s from Russia, hardly a good carrier-based aircraft but functional, but after Russia discovered that China had been mucking about building a Su-27 derivative without asking the deal fell through [China tells a different story, saying that Russia demanded exorbitant amounts to reopen production which it was unwilling to pay for a nearly obsolete aircraft]. As a result China operates the J-15 as its naval fighter, with... less than stellar results. It's extremely heavy, and, if it takes off from the carrier, has minimal range if carrying anything at all--it can't take more than two short range air to air missiles into the sky to fight enemy aircraft. However, the J-15 isn't really intended for combat service--it's intended to teach China how to run carriers, and it seems to work well enough for that task, aside from the multiple fatal crashes. There is, however, thought to be a new carrier fighter in the pipeline--most say the J-31/FC-31, which has reduced RCS and a number of carrier-unique features, is being pitched as a carrier-based aircraft and will serve as China's carrier fighter in the future. China also lacks any fixed wing carrier-based airborne early warning, which could prove troublesome--a lack of AEW means that its view is limited by the horizon--and has no resupply aircraft like the C-2 Greyhound. As a result, for the moment at least, China lacks an effective carrier force, but it is likely to continue developing rapidly in the next decade and become a fairly substantial threat. Remember that as recently as 2010, a Chinese aircraft carrier seemed preposterous to many people, and now they have two.

6. Some attention to land-based aircraft

Land-based aircraft as a naval weapon are not generally used by the US, which has never had a reason to develop them as a doctrinal focus. Sure, you could potentially envision them as being used, and there even were situations where they were utilized, but it just wasn't generally a priority or how things were done. For China, though, taking influence from the Soviets, and lying on littoral seas with hostile powers in the First Island Chain, land-based aircraft and missiles are a key part of doctrine. Although this is often viewed as a new thing, called A2/AD [anti access/area denial], it's really the result of a long historical evolution of naval power, probably most refined by the Soviet Union. As a result, land-based naval aviation plays an important role, firing anti-ship missiles at standoff distances at enemy vessels, and shore-based launchers of anti-ship missiles are also an important weapon. The combination of these systems means that venturing within China's littoral seas is a dangerous proposition during war, and some waters, like those of the Taiwan Strait, are effectively considered closed at this point in the event of hostilities breaking out. For this reason air superiority is also important in this sort of naval warfare, as if either side gains air superiority it can pummel its opponents with air-launched anti-ship missiles. China's capabilities in this area are sophisticated and should not be underestimated, but they are unlikely to go through a rapid period of growth like the PLAN's fleet.
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And a brief note dedicated entirely to the DF-21D "Carrier killer" that the PLA likes to show off. It's a pretty impressive capability, on paper, using a ballistic missile to hit a carrier. The CEP [circular error probable] means that it could even happen, presuming that an aircraft carrier was good enough to sit in one place, not moving, long enough to be detected by China. Aircraft carriers look big, but the seas are huge, and they're surprisingly hard to find. They also move quite fast, in excess of of 35mph/55kph, and thus by the time the ballistic missile has launched it might well be out of range given the fact that ballistic missiles are not particularly known for their maneuverability in terminal stages, at least not in the realm of miles. The DF-21D is not a particular threat to the modern aircraft carrier. It could potentially be one if it evolves into a hypersonic boost-glide vehicle, but that's a whole additional can of worms, that I might address a different day.

7. The PLAN's plans for the future--what will it look like in 2030?

Unfortunately the PLAN is not exactly the most open of navies, as I've repeatedly mentioned. There are no public debates over acquisitions programs, no big fleet shape plans, relatively little detail.
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However, a few things are fairly sure bets or publicly announced.
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China has repeatedly announced plans to build a six-carrier force, including the Type 001 and Type 002, but also a pair of Type 003 [already under construction] conventionally powered supercarriers and a pair of Type 004 nuclear powered supercarriers. However, it seems that the Type 004 is currently on hold. Why, exactly, is unclear, but it seems to be technical difficulties, which are not particularly surprising given that China's experience with nuclear maritime propulsion seem to be rather limited and have had poor results in their submarine fleet. The costs were also expected to be too high--China does not have an unlimited quantity of money, despite what it may flaunt, and nuclear carriers are expensive to develop especially given that China has not built a nuclear-powered surface ship before.
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A new carrier-based fighter is almost certainly in the cards because the J-15 is pretty much useless. The FC-31 seems by far the most likely candidate but it could be another aircraft we haven't seen yet. The addition of this aircraft will greatly improve the PLAN's capabilities.
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China also has two Type 075 amphibious assault ships/LHDs under construction, and I would expect this class to be much more prolific. These ships are much more affordable than the full carriers, and focus on areas in which China is particularly concerned--amphibious assaults, say, on islands in the South China Sea or on Taiwan, and anti-submarine warfare, which is of particular importance given that submarines cannot be easily halted with land-based anti-ship missiles and air-launched cruise missiles provided for in their area denial doctrine--submarines are one of the few things that can slip through that net.
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The surface combatant fleet is likely to continue growing, but I am not sure if it will swell much beyond the ~23 Type 052D ships planned and the 8 Type 055s. We're likely to see the retirement of the classes preceding the Type 052C destroyer and the Type 054 frigate, and they may be offloaded to Bangladesh, Myanmar, or Pakistan--there is substantial precedent here, and it seems that China is interested in expanding the naval capabilities of its partners around India.
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The submarine fleet is likely to see rapid expansion if the PLAN is satisfied with the Type 095 and Type 096 classes, and we're likely to see more diesel-electric subs built as well. Submarines are generally quite good at fighting submarines and conducting area-denial missions, and the large and capable subsurface forces of Japan, Korea, and the United States means that this has to be an area the PLAN invests more in--and the fact that several Southeast Asian nations are also looking at acquiring submarines makes the issue more pressing.

8. Conclusion

China has in the past decade gone from a third-rate navy to perhaps the greatest threat the US Navy has faced since the Second World War. This has significant geopolitical implications, and has resulted in neighbors scrambling to overhaul their naval forces. The growth of the PLAN means that the US can no longer easily defend Taiwan or the South China Sea, or any of China's littoral waters. This, more than anything else, is what has everyone scrambling in the US talking about "great-power competition" because denying access to the US Navy and working on power projection, an inherently naval thing, is essentially a clear sign that China is looking to directly compete with the United States. Underestimate the PLAN at your own peril.
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I hope to have more detail and citations in future posts, but unfortunately the PLAN is very secretive [yes, I've said that fifty times already] and this is a pretty big topic to discuss without going into details about all sorts of naval tidbits. Thanks for reading the fourth post in what I hope will be a fairly substantial series, probably around ~12 posts.
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9. Citations

James Holmes, "The Danger Zone In Naval Arms Races"
USNI, Report to Congress on Chinese Naval Modernization
Hans Kristensen, China's Noisy Nuclear Submarines
Eric Wertheim, China's Type 052D Destroyer is a potent adversary
Robert Farley, Let's Talk About The Chinese Navy's Type 055 Destroyer
Ryan Pickrell, Chinese fighter jet holding China back as it builds carrier fleet
Look, much more here is based on loose speculation, more unreliable sources, and stuff I've picked up over the years, because public info is limited. So take everything I say with a grain of salt, but understand that it's the best information I know of.