Quote:But should they?Yup, pretty sure they should.
In almost every story and in almost every medium, stealth systems in space are tactical, not strategic, weapons designed to confer tactical, not strategic, invisibility. To run through everything would be an appalling task, but in The Expanse, a big part of the plot is the Martian radiation coating which absorbs emissions and lets them sneak up without being firedon; in Mass Effect we have exactly the same; Honor Harrington has two different kinds of stealth ships (e.g. in "Mission of Honor") which both get you into weapons range; in Star Trek the Romulans can hide mere metres beneath you while being totally invisible (in the last movie they even shoot while doing so, I think); Battlestar Galactica had the Blackbird, which was so stealthy it got destroyed when a Cylon ship ploughed through it without seeing it; in Babylon 5 the Minbari were even more stealthy than that, actually getting inside a Centauri ship and pinching their atmosphere without being noticed; in Stargate almost everyone from the Goa'uld to the Asgard can pull this trick with more or less success. I'm only adding the "emission cloaking" element to my suggestion because it follows naturally from short-range cloaking - you shouldn't be able to find 10 parsecs away what you can't find under your own nose.
Quote:However if you can hide from ship sensors just by turning on your thingy, you would be impossible to find or attack
So, as we've established, this is the whole point of cloaking. An almost continuous stream of examples from classic and mainstream sci-fi over the last few decades creates an expectation that when a player sees "cloaking device" he's going to get something which stops him from getting shot at while switched on. Recent games like Starmade naturally follow this expectation without feeling any need to explain themselves; it's just a natural assumption. You'd have to make a pretty strong case that cloaking devices, in our universe, should mean something totally different, entirely to do with long range strategic obfuscation. Haxus added cloaking shields the module list long before emissions were even discussed, so I doubt that's all he intended them to do. I'm voting for the Expanse/Mass Effect version (absorption) because it's a nice, consistent system which isn't too far fetched and two of my favourite harder sci-fi shows use it in more or less the same way.
Stealth ships are scouts, so they should allow you to enter a system and scout the disposition of enemy forces, otherwise they're fairly pointless. The system would need a few more balances, of course, in addition to the quite strict time limit. You can't shoot or use transporters while cloaked, but you can't be shot at either. The cloaking shield should perhaps have special shield properties which prevent you from ramming with full effect. Perhaps there is a minimum effective range, greater than weapons range, at which you will be detected, so your best bet is to skirt system boundaries and install powerful sensors. That would be logical scout behaviour.