 In late 1934, the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) issued a specification for new scout bomber and torpedo bomber designs.Eight companies submitted ten designs in response, evenly split between monoplanes and biplanes.Exemplifying the Bureau of Aeronautics' reluctance to fully embrace the monoplane configuration for carrier-based aircraft, the XSB3U-1 was proposed as a more conventional alternative to Vought's XSB2U-1, which was designed as a modern monoplane.