 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.
