Ship's maneuverability is very important factor in safe ship handling and economical ship operation. Steering characteristics are consisted of course stability and maneuverability. Today in many advanced ship-building countries, they study ship's course stability, using model ship tests, such as straight line tests, rotating arm tests and Planar Motion Mechanism (PMM) etc., in tow in tanks. It is the purpose of this paper to provide ship's handlers with better understanding of steering characteristics and to help them in safe controlling and manevering . In this paper, the author simulated response of various vessels, running straight course with constant speed, and they are disturbed by small external disturbance of one degree yaw angle with no angular velocity . The author used the hydrodynamic derivtives resulted at tests of Davidson's laboratory in Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, U.S.A. Course stability was evaluated and analyzed in various respects, such as block coefficient, ratio of ship's length to beam, draft and rudder area ratio etc. The obtained results are as follows : (1) The ship's course stability is affected by magnitude of block coefficient greatly. In case that the block coefficient is more than 0.7, the deviation varies at nearly same rate but the requistite time to reach the steady course is different. (2) The ship's course stability is affected by magnitude of L/B. When the dimensionless time reaches about 3, the deviation and requisite time to reach the steady course are influenced nearly same. After the dimensionless time is about 3, they change on invariable ratio. (3) The effect to course stability by L/T and RA' can be neglected. (4) The reason why thy VLCC and container feeder vessel are unstable on their course is that their block coefficient is generally more than 0.8 and the ratio of ship's length to beam is about 6.0.

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