The Meteor class was a pair of two avisos built for the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) in the late-1880s and early 1890s.

Both vessels suffered from serious problems that rendered them unfit for service, namely poor seakeeping and excessive vibration of their propeller shafts.

Meteor had a somewhat more active career, serving with the fleet in 1893–1894 and then as a fishery protection ship in 1895–1896, but she, too, spent most of her existence laid up.

The Imperial Navy began building small avisos in the 1880s to serve in the main fleet in German waters.

Unlike the contemporary German unprotected cruisers, their designs emphasized offensive capability and high speed rather than a long cruising radius.

In 1888, the German naval command decided that future avisos should be focused solely on defense against hostile torpedo boats.

They suffered from severe vibration and their small size rendered them poor sea boats; these defects significantly curtailed their careers, and they spent most of their existence in reserve.

[2][3] The Meteor class was the second to last aviso design produced by the Imperial Navy, followed only by Hela; by the 1890s, German naval designers had taken the best characteristics of the avisos and the contemporary unprotected cruisers and combined them in the Gazelle class of light cruisers, the first vessels of that type of warship.

[4][5] Their propulsion system consisted of two vertical 3-cylinder triple expansion engines that drove a pair of 2.8 m (9 ft 2 in) wide, three-bladed screw propellers.

The ships were equipped with a pair of electric generators with a combined output of 20 to 24 kilowatts (27 to 32 hp) at 67 volts.

They also carried three 35 cm (13.8 in) torpedo tubes, one mounted submerged in the bow and the other two in deck-mounted launchers on the broadside.