Why DO firelocks turn off the lights?

[Not-Dorsidarf]

This has been bugging me for a while but why do firelocks turn the lights off the moment they trigger? It makes them significantly more annoying than the actual fire alarm sounds, and makes every emergency situation more confusing and dangerous (and every non emergency situation where the lights are going off for no reason because firelocks are broken).

It doesnt even prevent fires, lights blowing up still start plasmafires when the fire alarm has "turned them off".

[zxaber]

Technically, the lights are not off, they're in emergency mode. This is why they can still break, spark, and start fires. There's certainly an argument that red emergency lighting should be "low power" and thus not spark, which would give a great functional reason for it.

Anyway, the answer to your question is thematics. Atmospherics alarms throwing hallways into an eerie red hue is a common sci-fi trope, and gives a sense of danger. Unfortunately, due to a bunch of different factors, the least scuffed way to handle it is on the area level, which bathes entire rooms in red, rather than just the lights immediately around the issue causing the alarms.

[Jacquerel]

Fire alarm lights are a multilpier of how lights look normally
They were tuned to provide an atmospheric red tint to departments during an emergency, it is intentionally a bit darker but shouldn't be impossible to see in
Later, we went through and reduced the number and range of lights in general to reduce the effect of everything being fully lit even after destroying multiple lights
This change was not made with firelock lights in mind, so it made emergency lighting much darker as the effect was tuned to when we had 6 overlapping light regions per square inch of corridor

Anyone is free to tune the red lighting back up to be more visible, however nobody has

[TheFinalPotato]

https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/80384