Alpha strike

See also: weapon grouping

This generally refers to weapons platforms with multiple disparate weapons, such as a battle tank with main cannon, machine gun, and a small rocket pod and/or mortar firing all of these at same target simultaneously.

In most games this is either hard to accomplish (all weapons have their own firing button) or impossible (player can only use one weapon at a time, needing to cycle through the various weapons to use them). In games where this is possible however, there's either weapon linking/grouping possible that allows all weapons to be linked together, or there's a specific alpha strike button.

Some things can make this somewhat hard to accomplish (and thus not considered too strictly) is when weapons have individual firing arcs that have certain blind spots in areas others don't.

Not to be confused with alpha damage which is used in some games to refer to average damage of single attack (not damage over time/damage per second which includes firerate and reload time calculations) or salvo.