The preceding River- or E-class destroyers of 1903 had made on the provided by triple expansion steam engines and coal-fired boilers, although was powered by steam turbines. In November 1904, the First Sea Lord "Jackie" Fisher proposed that the next class of destroyers should make at least and should use oil-fired boilers and steam turbines as a means of achieving this. This resulted in a larger ship to provide the required doubling of installed power over their predecessors, but also pushed the design to the limits of capability of contemporary technology. As a result, the Tribals were severely compromised and a somewhat retrograde step after the successful River class; they were lightly built and proved to be fragile in service. More alarmingly however, they were only provided with 90 tons of bunkerage, and with high fuel consumption resulting from a high power output of , they were highly uneconomical and had a severely limited radius of action; "Afridi" and "Amazon" once used 9.5 tons of oil each simply to raise steam for a three-mile (5 km) return journey to a fuel depot.