Note that it's quite common in competitive play to have one of your ships be "power-cringed" in this way. It's a min/maxing strategy. It's essentially fitting more systems on your ships at the cost of increasing the demand on your ability to micro the ship so you don't run out of power mid-fight.

can you explain this?

When PDTRT is set to AUTO, if you press Z and click on a missile/craft to PD prioritize it, the Floodlight activates and fires at the missile/craft you just clicked. This is because the game considers the illuminator as a dual-purpose turret, so it would be turn on automatically to boost point defense FCR. This does not happen when PDTRT is set to DEDI.

By having PDTRT set to DEDI, we never have to worry about the illuminator firing without our explicit command. We want to micro the illuminator in this build to have enough power in critical moments when you need to launch your full salvo of 6 torpedoes, which is not possible in this build if you have the illuminator on because it saps power from the missile programming buses.

what does the illuminator do on its own?

On its own, the illuminator is there to do 2 things:
- Offensively: To break through jamming and attain target lock, if you're being jammed. Turn it off once you got a lock. So you have power to do other things.
- Defensively: To illuminate your own chaff to defeat SAH seekers.

"Set your PDTRT to DEDI on the torpcello at the start of the match to avoid having the illuminator automatically firing on PD prioritized targets and unnecessarily drawing power."

can you explain this? what does the illuminator do on its own?