Hi there DogNine,
Always nice to see a new face here, hope you do pick up modding again. Onto your queries though...
1) Secondary weapon generators are supposed to take over when your main one gets nobbled in order for you to continue fighting ( a favourite tactic of mine is to target the weapons and shield generators in order to take a ship out of the fight and allow me to move onto the next fairly quickly. Then come back and destroy them at my leisure
).
2) As to whether or not they work, they only way to know for sure would be to create a quick mission where your ship only has a secondary generator on board - not a main one and see if you can fight. A quick search of the tacticstypes.ini seems to suggest that these are player devices only, none of the predefined shiptypes seem to have one.
3) They do have a power output like the main ones. The entry reads like "
1 30" for one of them. The first number represents where they send the power (1 being weapons and 4 being the energy reserve cells) and the second number represents how much energy per tick it delivers (in this case approx 300 energy units per second (a tick is about a tenth of a second I think)).
Hope that helps, keep us updated though.
Regards,
The Old Dragon