In their current state flashlight are not very useful. Over long distances they are too weak and over short distances they sometimes blind the operator. Functional flashlights and ship-floodlight would not only be useful, they would also intensify the game's atmosphere. There may currently be gameplay implications for not increasing the luminance, for example blinding other players in pvp. While problems like this obviously need to be addressed from a gameplay point of view, I expect the necessary changes in gamecode to be minor.