Taut mooring
The line rises from the anchor under normal pretension, so there is no grounded line to lift off the seabed as line tension increases. Because of this, taut moorings work in a fundamentally different way to catenary moorings, their compliance deriving mainly from the elastic stretch of the lines, whereas a catenary mooring derives its compliance from the change in suspended line weight.
A taut mooring leg will usually have an angle of between 30 and 45 degrees to horizontal at the vessel (determined from design considerations) and will exhibit fairly linear load-excursion characteristics which are related to this angle and the stiffness of the line.

Because taut moorings have a much more linear stiffness than the progressively stiffening catenary systems, offsets under mean load can be better controlled and vessel motions do not induce such a high proportion of total line tensions.
A further advantage is the better load sharing between adjacent lines than is typical of a catenary array, so improving overall efficiency of the system.
The taut mooring also overcomes another limitation of deepwater catenarys by having much shorter lines, saving material and giving a more compact seabed footprint.
The lines of a taut mooring need to have sufficient elasticity to absorb the vessel wave motions without over loading. Where motions are low either because of benign wave environment (eg. West Africa or Brazil) or because of the vessel characteristics, (as a SPAR for example), wire ropes may be appropriate, particularly in deep water where there is the line length to develop enough stretch. However, the weight of steel mooring wires in very deep waters may become too much of a penalty on the vessel payload and, furthermore, strength utilization is reduced as more of the line tension capacity will be used in keeping the wire taut.