Alpha strike

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Alpha strike is a term used by the United States Navy to denote a large air attack by an aircraft carrier air wing, first coined during the Vietnam War.

In wargames, an alpha strike is a sudden, all-out attack with no consideration for defense or conserving reserves. The term entered wargaming parlance through Star Fleet Battles, in which an "alpha strike" is an attack with all available charged weapons that bear on an enemy. Such an attack has the advantage of being able to punch through an enemy's reinforced shields in a single shot, but is a less efficient than a sequence of smaller attacks that take advantage of the "Mizia effect." In BattleTech, the term is used in a similar sense: an attack that involves firing all of a 'Mech's weapons, something that could leave the attacker helpless by overheating and shutting down his or her 'Mechs.

In CCP's Massively Multiplayer Game, EVE Online, "alpha strike" has come to denote the damage done by a single salvo from a ship's weapons, rather than damage per second (DPS for short), which is the ratio of damage per salvo and "salvos per second". For example, a weapon could have a very high alpha strike and very low damage per second if it did a great deal of damage per salvo, but the salvos were quite sporadic. In this case, alpha strike calculations are primarily a useful figure for fleet battles, where ships are seldom in a battle long enough for their attackers to fire more than once, and so fleet commanders often try to squeeze out every last bit of damage for their fleet's opening volley on an enemy ship to ensure its destruction. This is normally achieved by activating all weapons before targeting a player, therefore, causing all weapons to fire at the same time instead of being staggered.