This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.For the more accurate prediction on manoeuvring performance of a ship at initial design phase, bare hull manoeuvring coefficients were estimated by RANS(Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes) based virtual captive model tests. Hydrodynamic forces and moment acting on the hull during static drift and harmonic oscillatory motions were computed with a commercial RANS code STAR-CCM+. Automatic and consistent mesh generation could be implemented by using macro functions of the code and user dependency could be greatly reduced. Computed forces and moments on KCS and KVLCC 1&2 were compared with the corresponding measurements from PMM(Planar Motion Mechanism) tests. Quite good agreement can be observed between the CFD and EFD results. Manoeuvring coefficients and IMO standard manoeuvres estimated from the computed data also showed reasonable agreement with those from the experimental data. Based on these results, we could confirm that the developed virtual captive manoeuvring model test process could be applied to evaluate manoeuvrability of a ship at the initial hull design phase.