Background
In September 1912, the General Board of the United States Navy asked the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R) to develop plans for the next class of destroyers. The General Board asked for a design with four 4-inch (102 mm) guns, six twin 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes, and twenty floating mines, that could travel at up to 35 knots (65 km/h) with steaming radius of 2,500 nautical miles at 20 knots (4,600 km at 37 km/h). C&R came back with a design for a 385-foot (117 m) long, 2,160-long-ton (2,190 t) displacement, triple-screw "super-destroyer" requiring 40,000 shaft horsepower (30,000 kW) to make the design speed of 35 knots (65 km/h). The C&R design was similar to, but larger than the unique British destroyer HMS Swift of 1907, and more than twice the displacement of the largest U.S. destroyers.
The General Board, whose main concern was the integrated operation of the United States battle fleet, pushed for the design to provide more scouting capabilities for fleet operations. But the high cost of the design—$1,900,000 for hull and machinery vs. $790,000 for the O'Brien class ships—and the lack of operating experience with the Cassin class—the first of the "thousand tonners" (destroyers exceeding 1,000 long tons (1,020 t) displacement) which were just beginning to be launched—caused C&R to resist the much larger design. The Chief Constructor of the Navy, the head of C&R, pointed out that the British had not repeated the Swift design in the five years since her introduction, and noted that "a destroyer that gets too large loses many of the desirable features of the type".
In November 1912, the General Board offered several alternatives to reduce the size of the destroyer, and was convinced by C&R that the most practical solution was a design that shared much with the O'Brien class: matching that class' main battery and torpedo load but with a design speed of 29.5 knots (54.6 km/h) and the desired 2,500-nautical-mile (4,600 km) steaming radius. The General Board also specified that the ships be equipped with "two aeroplane guns, if they can be developed and installed", have provisions for laying thirty-six mines, and a strengthened bow for ramming. The C&R design for the Tucker class, DD-57 through DD-62, was approved by the Secretary of the Navy in December 1912, and authorized by Congress in 1913.
Read more about this topic: Tucker Class Destroyer
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