The Accuracy of a Ares Alpha is 7 with smartlink. Chances you roll >7 hits are rather small even with higher dicepools so leaving that out for now. That puts the Alpha at 2.7 damage less, vs 5 dodge dice which at the least would take off 1.7 damage, so the Alpha is at 1 damage less in the scenario where both hit. We're talking firefights, which means we're not talking unaware enemies and if they were for some reason they'd likely go down from both weapons. The Alpha can fire 7 Full Auto Simple Action bursts in a single clip and it's only 1 Simple + 1 Free, or 2 Simple, Actions to reload. If we assume both weapons are loaded with APDS, we're talking Physical Damage on anyone at 18 armor or less with a single nethit, with regular rounds that's 14 which equals an Armor Jacket + Helmet. AJ+Helmet+OS4 still is only 18 armor.
So to summarize:
- The Desert Strike is much more expensive than the Ares Alpha.
- Ares Alpha is at 1 damage less when both hit, but that's not enough to properly calculate.
- Enemies awareness is mostly irrelevant so the dodge dice are a must in the comparison.
- 7 IPs of combat without any reloading issues generally would round up the fight.
- Even if a gunfight takes longer than 7 bursts, reloading a clip-weapon isn't a problem at all.
- Accuracy rarely matters, even when ignoring Taking Aim. But at high dicepools, it would, so we'll take a high dicepool into account below.
So what primarily stands is the 2 2/3 damage more vs the -5 defense dice. Let's assume an 18-dice attacker and a 12-dice + 15-dice defender.
18v12: 71.85% hitting chance, average 3.215 net hits on a hit.
18v7: 91.28% hitting chance, average 4.075 net hits on a hit.
So that's 16.215/-8 * 71.85% vs 15.075/-6 * 91.28%. Let's do a very rough estimate and convert the AP to damage while ignoring excess soak situations. Excess Soak situations would end up decreasing the average damage of the desert strike, so ignoring them here should be fine (we probably end up overestimating the damage from the desert strike a tiny bit like this). So we got 18.882 * 71.85% vs 17.075 * 91.28%, 13.567 vs 15.586 before soak. In other words, the Ares Alpha ends up 2 damage higher on average before soak. Note that we ignored Accuracy in these equations, a more detailed test would skew the results away from the desert strike a tiny tad for excess soak involvement, while skewing it a decent bit towards it due to Accuracy. The Desert Strike would gain approximately 1/3 hit on average from this, so clearly a more detailed test is required.
So let's try again, assuming both weapons use a Smartgun and the Attacker has 18 dice vs 12 dice for the defender. We're ignoring Soak for now, which means the damage difference leans towards the Alpha a tiny bit. This is because applying Soak requires more than AnyDice can easily handle, since it means we need to make sure only non-zero values end up getting boosted by base damage, then soaked. So this would require using a program to either calculate or approximate.
output [highest of 0 and [lowest of 9 and 18d{0,0,1}]-12d{0,0,1}]
output [highest of 0 and [lowest of 7 and 18d{0,0,1}]-7d{0,0,1}]
We now get 71.83% vs 91.27% as hitting chances, so those didn't change much, but average nethits did. 3.132 vs 3.638 net hits on a hit. So the Alpha ended up turning in more average damage on a hit. Let's approximate by adding AP and base damage again. The Desert Strike gets 15.667 added for a total of 18.799 on a hit, 13.503 average damage. The Alpha will face a bigger loss: +13 = 16.638 on a hit, 15.186 average damage. So despite the 2 2/3 damage advantage for the Desert Strike, versus a 12-dice defender the Ares Alpha does > 1 2/3 more damage.
As for 18 dice vs 15 dice: 57.15%*(15.667+2.765)=10.534, 80.34%*(13+3.037)=12.884, Alpha does > 2 1/3 more damage than the Desert Strike. So with a highly augmented + attributed enemy, the Alpha is even better.
So if Recoil never accumulates if you fire Simple Bursts, the Ares Alpha outdoes the more expensive Ares Desert Strike in damage. This also proves that on the first shot, the Automatic is by far superior. However, Accumulative Recoil plays a big part to balance this difference out. With Accumulative Recoil, the Longarms user has a fair chance at inflicting equal damage against skilled opponents in the long run, even if they lose out on the first shot(s).