Enviroment is way to Over powered

[Kitty.Hawk]

Dust clouds will not damage Balloon or Hull/Armor. They will damage everything else though.
 
Trust me, I played far to many CP Battle on the Dunes recently to not know. ._.

[Erheller]

I'm pretty sure hull and balloon take damage. Try taking a squid in sandbox and flying into a dust cloud - you'll see that the hull is visually damaged if you wait for a couple of seconds, and the balloon also takes damage (it takes quite a bit longer for the damage to be visually visible). In both cases you can hit the component with a tool and get a repair cooldown, which confirms that yes, sandstorms do damage to the armor and balloon (albeit greatly reduced damage in comparison to components).

That being said, the damage to armor/balloon is so small that it hardly matters (on most ships it won't even show up visibly if you get out of the cloud quickly).

[Thomas]

Dust clouds damage everything. However, the damage is extremely minor to the armor, hull, and balloons. So much so that it won't even register for quite a while on the HUD. However, if you smack those components with a repair tool, it'll actually fix it and go into cooldown.

[Omniraptor]

I'm pretty sure clouds inflict standard shatter-type damage, with appropriate modifiers for different components. So yes, everything takes damage.

[GreyTea]

Yeah Dust clouds damage the hull the same way tar does...yes you can get a tar kill best moment ever i think i broke my vocal cords laughing,

Pro tip: repair spire hull 30, go on dunes sit near a sand cloud with a spanner wait 90 seconds haha bing achievment complete,

[macmacnick]

I do something similar occasionally when I have to fully repair stuff as a gunner/pilot.

[Chmielewski]

Dust clouds are pretty easy to avoid. You should play tutorials and try to manuever. %)

[The Sky Wolf]

At least it's not pot smoke clouds. Thank the stars your engineers aren't trying to eat their rubber mallets after flying through one of those.

[Piemanlives]

Grey I'm going to have to ask you to keep things helpful in this section of the forum.

[The Sky Wolf]

Grey I'm going to have to ask you to keep things helpful in this section of the forum.

It is important to provide helpful suggestions and experienced feedback relating to the Feedback and Suggestions forum threads. I think you should try it with this one, Piemanlives. Though you might not have much to say considering he's made his point very clear and I'm pretty sure he's gotten his answer... The heavy flowing debris filled clouds provide a tactical advantage to those experienced enough to know how to identify them from regular clouds and use them strategically; it helps to prevent too much cloud cover usage which may cause many matches to become too slow and stagnant.

 In Starbound's case he was not yet experienced enough at the time to tell the two apart and therefore assumed that all of the clouds were this unrealistically damaging. This is possibly why Muse has been working so hard on improving tutorials lately.

[Piemanlives]

In Starbound's case he was not yet experienced enough at the time to tell the two apart and therefore assumed that all of the clouds were this unrealistically damaging. This is possibly why Muse has been working so hard on improving tutorials lately.

I'll have to agree, information is key to actually play successfully, without knowing certain aspects you can expect a slightly lower range of performance. For instance communicating what the various different types of damage actually do is very important, while more or less straight forward, the difference between piercing and high explosive in relation to certain components may not exactly be clear to newer players. 

[Frazzledragon]

The only thing I find annoying (especially about Dunes) is that it's fairly hard to distinguish between normal clouds and dust clouds.

One is white, the other is brown.
For your sake I hope you are colorblind.

[Kitty.Hawk]

Oh hull and balloon damage: Dang, I will have to remember that now.
 
On cloud color, quite often, on dunes, the dust cloud will be hidden inside of the normal white clouds, effectively making them indistinguishable until I am inside, taking damage.