Two ''Ferret''-class destroyers served with the
Royal Navy. and were built by
Laird, displaced 280 tons and were in overall length.
Armament
They were armed with one
12-pounder 12-pounder gun or 12-pdr, usually denotes a gun which fired a projectile of approximately 12 pounds.
Guns of this type include:
*12-pounder long gun, the naval muzzle-loader of the Age of Sail
*Canon de 12 de Vallière, French cannon of 1732
*Cano ...
and three 6-pounder guns, and three torpedo tubes (two on deck mounts and one fixed bow tube). The bow tube was soon removed, and provision was made for removing the deck tubes and substituting two extra 6-pounder guns. They carried a complement of 42 (later raised to 53).
Background
The invention of the self-propelled
torpedo by
Robert Whitehead and
Austrian Navy
The Austro-Hungarian Navy or Imperial and Royal War Navy (german: kaiserliche und königliche Kriegsmarine, in short ''k.u.k. Kriegsmarine'', hu, Császári és Királyi Haditengerészet) was the naval force of Austria-Hungary. Ships of the A ...
Captain
Giovanni Luppis in 1866, combined with the introduction of small fast
torpedo boats posed a threat to
battleship
A battleship is a large armored warship with a main battery consisting of large caliber guns. It dominated naval warfare in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The term ''battleship'' came into use in the late 1880s to describe a type of ...
s: large numbers of torpedo boats could overwhelm a battleship's defences and sink it, or distract the battleship and make it vulnerable to opposing capital ships. Torpedo boats proved devastatingly effective in the
1891 Chilean Civil War
The Chilean Civil War of 1891 (also known as Revolution of 1891) was a civil war in Chile fought between forces supporting Congress and forces supporting the President, José Manuel Balmaceda from 16 January 1891 to 18 September 1891. The war ...
.
The defence against torpedo boats was clear: small warships accompanying the fleet that could screen and protect it from attack by torpedo boats. Several European navies developed vessels variously known as torpedo boat "catchers", "hunters" and "destroyers", while the Royal Navy itself operated
torpedo gunboats. However, the early designs lacked the range and speed to keep up with the fleet they were supposed to protect. In 1892, the
Third Sea Lord,
Rear Admiral
Rear admiral is a senior naval flag officer rank, equivalent to a major general and air vice marshal and above that of a commodore and captain, but below that of a vice admiral. It is regarded as a two star "admiral" rank. It is often regarde ...
Jackie Fisher ordered the development of a new type of ships equipped with the then novel
water-tube boilers and
quick-firing small calibre guns.
Orders
Six ships to the specifications circulated by the Admiralty were ordered initially, comprising three different designs each produced by a different shipbuilder:
* and from Yarrow (the ).
* and from
John I. Thornycroft & Company (the
''Daring'' class)
* and from
Laird, Son & Company .
Design
These boats all featured a turtleback (i.e. rounded)
forecastle that was characteristic of early British TBDs. All six of them were removed from service and disposed of by the end of 1912, and thus were not affected by the Admiralty decision in 1913 to group all the surviving 27-knot and 30-knot destroyers (which had followed on these six 26-knot vessels) into four heterogeneous classes, labelled "A", "B", "C" and "D" classes.
The ''Ferret''-class destroyers were followed by the larger which were built by Lairds less than a year later.
Bibliography
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{{A class destroyer (1913)
Destroyer classes
Ship classes of the Royal Navy