Proper prediction of ship maneuvering – together with powering and seakeeping – is considered essential these days to help naval architects design optimal ship hulls. In this context, traditional finite-volume Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods offer a well-proven simulation platform to realize such predictions with a high degree of certainty. In this work, a novel transient CFD method based on a linearized free-surface RANS solver is presented to assess maneuvering actions of both captive and free-running ship performance on a series of selected test cases. The performance of the proposed solver is considerably better in terms of solution speed than other traditional CFD methods employed for this type of analysis, especially when applied to transient solutions requiring long simulation times.