Since the proximate cause of the weapon group overrides is the AI (briefly) taking control of the player ship when the player ship is given orders on the TAB map,
it would have been far more efficient to suggest that
the player ship not receive TAB map commands in the first place, except when already on autopilot.The sole purpose of autofire is to enable a higher, practical firing priority over other weapon groups. For example, that the AI overrides the autofire of Heavy Blasters in an Aurora, and instead prioritizes low projectile damage weapons to consume the last drops of flux capacity so that my Heavy Blasters never fire near flux limit, ruins my intent to take down armour effectively and ruins the chance of overloading an enemy ship with my guns in most critical situations.
If the ship is fluxed enough that firing small guns interferes with its ability to fire Heavy Blasters, and your expectation is that it
continue to fire the Heavy Blasters regardless of any other consideration, then all I can say is the AI ship understands this better than you do and
directly improves its own chances of survival by disregarding your intent. (Not that it should continue firing the small weapons either, arguably). At best, it's going to be forced to drop its shield, and at worst, it risks an overload from any hit on the shield.
Do you have a guess why one e.g. would enable autofire for a kinetic weapon group and disable autofire for a HE weapon group?! When you have found the answer (which I am tired of repeating again and again) ask yourself why you believe that the motive for this is allegedly different for a manually and AI piloted ship!
This is exactly what I do when I fly my ships, albeit mainly because I can't easily control the firing of two weapon groups at once. I let the kinetics autofire because they're good against the more common target (shields) and also decent against broken armor, while HE needs manual control for opportunity shots when shields aren't in the way.
At the very least, only PD weapons should ignore the linked firing mode when engaging fighters or missiles, even though I disagree with this because there is also a purpose of linking PD weapons with matching arcs against shielded fighters.
What I'm reading here if you got what you wanted (PD weapons also have the proposed behavior where LINKED mode requires all guns to bear before firing), I would have to divide my PD net into different groups for every quadrant, otherwise none of the weapons would ever fire because some of the other weapons in the group can never reach the target.
Or, if implemented in a less stupid way: they could all be in the same group, but no PD weapon would ever fire till all the weapons that
could bear on the target have done so. Which is totally optimal and desired behavior when I have a Harpoon swarm incoming and every microsecond of DPS counts. Also wide mount arcs could become actively detrimental for PD weapons because they add someone else to wait for before opening fire.
Actually, that gives me a thought. Let's consider this with a picture:
Suppose the Legion's Mk.IXs are on linked mode with autofire on. In this situation, what should autofire do?
a) Fire the right gun, don't fire the left gun
b) Don't fire the right gun (because left gun is not on target)
c) Do A in this situation, but do B if the Sunder had been in front of us where the arcs overlap
d) Something else