Passive vs. Active Scanners

[Suicide Junkie]

"Did you guys reduce the reserch points and sizes for your stealth devices?"

Well, for P&N in particular, I mainly increased the cost of sensor tech.
The stealth devices are also nearly all built into devices that you would already place on ships...

Cloaking is provided by: stealth & scattering armor, Master computers, tachyon diffUsers and hull size.

Tachyon diffUsers and master computers can be ignored if you're not facing a temporal or psychic race, and the remainder (armor and hullsize) are fairly easy to research.

80KT of stealthing on an escort or frigate is enough to get unbeatable cloaking for most races.
However, A frigate with only 120 KT for C&C, engines and a payload is quite weak.
Anything larger can be detected by a level 3, starbase-mounted grav sensor.

This system still needs to be balanced, of course.