had a metacentric height of . She had a double bottom and her hull was subdivided into 213 watertight compartments. Her crew consisted of 670 officers and enlisted men. Azuma had two 4-cylinder triple-expansion steam engines, each driving a single propeller shaft. Steam for the engines was provided by 24 Belleville boilers and the engines were rated at a total of . The ship had a designed speed of . She carried up to of coal and could steam for at a speed of . Armament The main armament for all of the "Six-Six Fleet" armored cruisers was four Armstrong Whitworth-built 45-caliber eight-inch guns in twin-gun turrets fore and aft of the superstructure. The electrically operated turrets were capable of 130° rotation left and right, and the guns could be elevated to +30° and depressed to −5°. The turret accommodated 65 shells, but could only be reloaded through doors in the turret floor and the ship's deck that allowed the electric winch in the turret to hoist shells up from the shell room deep in the hull. The guns were manually loaded and had a rate of fire about 1.2 rounds per minute. The 203-millimeter gun fired armor-piercing (AP) projectiles at a muzzle velocity of to a range of . The secondary armament consisted of a dozen Elswick Ordnance Company "Pattern Z" quick-firing (QF), 40-caliber, 6-inch guns. All but four of these guns were mounted in armored casemates on the main and upper decks, and their mounts on the upper deck were protected by gun shields. Their AP shells were fired at a muzzle velocity of . Azuma was also equipped with a dozen 40-caliber QF 12-pounder 12-cwt guns and eight QF 2.5-pounder Yamauchi guns as close-range defense against torpedo boats. The former gun fired , projectiles at a muzzle velocity of . Azuma was equipped with five torpedo tubes, one above water in the bow and four submerged tubes, two on each broadside. The Type 30 torpedo had a warhead and three range/speed settings: at , at or at . Armor All of the "Six-Six Fleet" armored cruisers used the same armor scheme with some minor differences, one of which was that the four later ships all used Krupp cemented armor. The waterline belt ran the full length of the ship and its thickness varied from amidships to at the bow and stern. It had a height of ,