A Look at TACOM HQ’s Alpha TARAC and Why We Like It

If you’ve spent any time stretching rounds downrange, you already know the two eternal truths of shooting: gravity is always present and most “easy” ballistic shortcuts have a gotcha hidden somewhere. The Alpha TARAC from TACOM HQ is one of the rare tools that actually tilts the odds in your favor without burying you into electronics, cables, or six pages of menu settings. We’ve been running an Alpha on several of the rifles we are regularly testing our products, specifically ones chambered in 8.6 Blackout and 300 Blackout (That is where most of our testing is taking place at the moment but you can run the Alpha on any cartridge, these are just the ones we have the most experience running with the Alpha to date). Long story short, we have been super impressed and we want to share the product with our customer base. We are interested in promoting any product that will make our ammunition more effective, so we are writing this because we think the Alpha does exactly that. Full disclosure, we paid full retail for this system. We are literally just writing this because we think it’s awesome.

Think of the Alpha as a tiny prism that sits in front of your optic. This wedge‑shaped prism is ground to a precise angle. Flip the lever down, and the prism “kicks” your line of sight a smidge high or low (depending on how you mount it). That optical offset is small—often less than two degrees—but downrange it can equal inches or feet of vertical correction. There are no chips or batteries, and it takes up an extremely small amount of top rail real estate.

The third option is Speed Drop: Basically using the Alpha prism to turn the optic’s MIL marks into quick‑reference yard lines—hold 4.5 MIL at 450 yards, 6 MIL at 600 or something like that. This is the option we have yet to mess with but it is a very popular use of the Alpha on cartridges like 6 ARC where there’s an expectation to be able to rapidly engage multiple targets and intermediate distances precisely versus minute-of-target area in MPBR. The idea would be to simplify your ballistic solutions and keep you in your glass, engaging targets more quickly.

No Moving POI: Important detail—the Alpha moves your point of aim relative in space (not your target). The glass shifts what you see, but the rifle still shoots the same. That’s why you can flip it in/out without touching turrets, but hold the same point of aim on a target.

With the Eotech EXPS-3 you clip a couple degrees off your sight picture. Not a deal‑breaker, just noticeable. That’s basically it. With a different optic it would probably be even less noticeable. It’s a relatively pricey system so for some that might be a downside but you’re picking up a ton of utility and we would argue that the value supports the price. (We are launching new pricing starting June. It will be only $375 plus the mount.)

We want to squeeze every bit of performance possible out of our products. The Alpha TARAC is legit and genuinely one of the best pieces of equipment we have ever run. Mount it once, vet the data, and increase the percentage of first round impacts at extended range. If you are buying our products, you probably care about high-end performance. The Alpha TARAC won’t magically fix shitty shooting (trust us we know), but it does trim a couple cognitive steps from the ballistic dance. For us, that means faster follow‑ups, higher percentage of impacts on targets inside 300 yd, and a more flexible overall package in our weapon systems. Overall, our final thoughts are that we’d encourage you to take a look at TACOM HQ and mess with Alpha Tarac prism system. It performed above and beyond our expectations and it’s easily one of our favorite products we’ve messed with. We expect to see more adoption of the Alpha on the military side and think the civilian market will catch on as well.