>"After all..." She glanced at Fubuki's back, a few paces ahead of her,
>and continued, "She is the mother of us all."
>
>
>So...is this something I should really know and utterly missed?Possibly—I'm 87% sure it's come up somewhere at some point, but it's only alluded to in the text itself, so:
Fubuki was a revolutionary ship in her time. Destroyers before her were small, feebly armed ships, not much more capable than patrol boats—the name is actually short for "torpedo boat destroyer", which was all they were considered good for when it was coined. They had poor endurance and not very impressive seakeeping capabilities, so were really only fit for coastal defense, and incapable of operating far from their home ports without the services of a purpose-built destroyer tender (which would then have to be protected in one way or another).
Fubuki was designed to exploit a loophole in the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which restricted the signatories' authority to build capital ships, but didn't limit the number of smaller vessels they could field. Basically, the Japanese Admiralty wanted a ship that was exactly as big as she could be without falling under the rubric of a cruiser for treaty purposes, as fast and powerfully armed as was technically achievable, and with the endurance and seakeeping qualities to operate independently at long range for extended periods of time.
They got all that in the Fubuki class, which is why they were designated "Special Type Destroyers". When Fubuki entered service in 1928, she instantly redefined the standard for what a "destroyer" was, effectively from "oversized coastal patrol boat" to "miniature cruiser". Destroyers patterned after Fubuki became the worldwide go-to for everything from antisubmarine warfare to search-and-recovery to convoy escort to... well, anything a navy didn't absolutely need a cruiser-sized ship or bigger, or a flight deck, to accomplish.
Tashkent was built starting in 1937, nine years after Fubuki was commissioned, and was originally envisioned as sort of a next evolutionary step. The Soviets called them "destroyer leaders", extra-large destroyers intended to be the flagships of destroyer squadrons--really blurring the line between destroyers and light cruisers. Despite that uncertainty, kanmusu Tash thinks of herself as a destroyer, and as such, she recognizes and respects Fubuki as the first of the line. (By "us" in "the mother of us all", she specifically means destroyers.)
--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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