This study investigates the influence of ship rotation on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. Unlike stationary targets, ships at sea are subject to complex rotational motions—roll, pitch, and yaw—driven by ocean waves. These motions induce time-varying Doppler shifts during the coherent integration time, leading to significant image artifacts such as azimuth blurring, geometric distortion, and displacement. This paper analyzes the mapping relationship between rotational parameters and SAR image signatures through mathematical modeling and echo simulation. The findings reveal that even minor rotations can degrade the focus of the ship’s scattering centers, complicating Automatic Target Recognition (ATR). This research provides a theoretical foundation for developing motion compensation algorithms and improving the accuracy of ship feature extraction in dynamic maritime environments.