Not to mention his theory only makes categories for weapons, it doesn't change the problem of only 5 weapon groups. Sure it sounds nice on paper but you missed a ton of scenarios which would be a royal pain to implement with the primary, secondary and so on rules.
It changes the problem from tweaking the AI with weapon groups, to using weapon groups as the player convenience they should be. The player doesn't need more than 5 weapon groups to perform player actions, so there is no weapon group problem that needs solving.
Weapon groups can't even solve the problem to begin with.
The weapon issue is an AI issue. You solve AI issues with AI solutions. The AI doesn't understand player intent with weapons, and there's no clear way to define that intent. This weapon system defines broad brush attitudes towards its weapons. I stuck to AI features that are not very difficult to define, and which the game already attempts to discover on its own (sometimes failing in the process).
- Primary weapons define a very clear representation of the ship's combat range. The current AI system essentially tries to guess the combat range where a ship wants fight, and a ship with multiple weapon ranges typically causes a lot of problems for the AI. Let the player set the range. For carriers, their primary weapons tend to be strike craft. Primary weapons also help to define focus fire, all the main weapons should attempt to engage the primary target. Since primary weapons concern themselves with a ship's range and weapon arcs, they would dramatically affect how a ship chooses to move.
- Secondary weapons copy many aspects of the current AI system, I.E. what if every weapon behaved like its own weapon group and tried to be a smart weapon. There's nothing groundbreaking here, there's already a ton of rules for weapons trying to be the best they can be. The target behavior is more opportunistic, rather than actively pushing the ship into range like with primary weapons.
- The PD group basically flags a weapon as yes/no being PD, which is a behavior that already exists for PD weapons. However, sometimes you want a small weapon to be used very aggressively as well, such as PDs on a wolf or maybe you want a Dominator to get all in there. You can do that by upgrading PD to primary or secondary weapon behaviors, transforming a PD weapon into the main method of attack.
- The only feature that is really difficult to grasp is the tertiary group. It exists to classify rare, strategic power weapons that are very difficult to build an AI for. Generally it stops trying to fire the weapon as an immediate first action, trying to reserve it for a key turning point later in battle. Torpedoes already attempt to perform this behavior, by of holding themselves until a "killing blow" opportunity shows up. The "lunging phase ship" behavior doesn't even exist, that is legitimately breaking new ground on ideas for AI behavior. That might be more of a generic phase ship issue where they don't really understand how to fight, rather than a weapon grouping issue. But if you want a ship to dunk all its reaper torpedoes in the first 10 seconds, set it as a primary weapon. Maybe that's a thing you want, just a nightmare barrage of torpedoes sounds like fun.