Even if emissive was reduced, we still have the night vision problem with hulltanks. It would be nice if someone was in Silent Running, they wouldn't show up and be highlighted by night vision.
Nightvision's range has been reduced to ~10km for large ships and possibly a bit less for smaller vessels. It also helps against all foes, not just stealthy ones.
Anyway, having a ship not show up under nightvision while silent would present a problem in and of itself. NPCs don't use silent running and if an unresolved contact in a RES or some other area with high ship density can be immediately flagged as a CMDR vessel because it's the only one not glowing green under NV, you've just traded one situational element of stealth for another.
Honestly, I'm not particularly happy with NV at all. I use it when it's notably advantageous, of course, but the way it's implemented mostly defeats it's apparent purpose. I think they were going for something that would allow normal operation on the dark side of planets, while at the same time allowing them to make those areas more plausibly dark; eliminating the advantages of supposedly cosmetic paint jobs was also likely on their minds. Of course, with a 35km range (for terrain) NV mode, we've gone from a subtle light amplification to a binary choice of almost completely blind or having terrain glow neon green within a 35km radius, ships within 10km and SRVs within 800m (too far, IMO). Hard to appreciate the darkness of certain settings when you can just flick on NV and see most things better than if they were well lit.
I'm struggling to see a good alternative. Ideally, ships would just get headlights that were an order of magnitude stronger, but the performance of these is tied too closely to one's graphics settings for that to be viable. There is also the issue of ship paint/color to consider...prior to NV, dark colored paints could easily provide a tactical advantage.
Best compromise I can think of would be to make NV more of an active than passive mechanism; e.g. it could just shift the headlights of the craft into infrared and work mostly like NV currently does, but in a fairly narrow cone (say 30-45 degrees), rather than a global, 360 degree, effect.
