The ships were the first British cruisers to incorporate a number of features, such as an armored deck and quick-firing guns, as those designs were copied from other vessels.

Later designated as third-class cruisers, these vessels had the speed, size, and manuability to serve as a vanguard for ocean-going fleets of ironclads.

To rectify the issue in 1886, the design of the torpedo gunboat HMS Curlew was enlarged to make room for larger boilers that allowed for a top speed of 17 knots.

The design was then given a battery identical to that seen on HMS Buzzard (1887), the torpedo tube layout of Curlew, a protected deck similar to that on the Medina-class gunboats, and the name Barracouta.

To reach a top speed of 16.5 knots, the ships were fitted with 4 double ended boilers fed by 160 tons of coal that supplied two 3-cylinder vertical triple expansion engines that turned two propellers and produced a maximum of 3,000 ihp.