So this rule question came up with Debris clouds now being permitted in competitive play as a part of squad building (you pick your own 3 obstacles.)

As you could predict since this new game piece is now in the competitive play all sort of new scenarios and questions have been popping up that could use some clarification.

So lets say a ship pass through a debris cloud gains a stress token but either still performs an action (as in the case of tycho) or is able to pass off the stress (example Capt Yorr in play) Will the ship still need to skip the action step of their activation phase as described in obstacles of the core rule book?

The debris cloud cars says they act exactly like obstacles with the exceptions for suffering damage and making attacks and such so in that case then yes the action would be skipped even for Tycho in that argument. However the whole part of assigning the stress token seems to be the point in stopping the action step so unless treating it as an obstacle was intended insurance to stop actions then the treat as obstacles could be argued to mean only in terms of placing and activation.

Your position and argument in this case?

Debris Tokens do not instruct you to skip your Perform Action step. So if you can mitigate the Stress, you are free to perform an action. To understand how Debris tokens work simply read the Rules for Obstacles, but replace the Moving into and Through Obstacles section with the text on the reference card.

but replace the Moving into and Through Obstacles section with the text on the reference card.

Exactly, it's a bit like a copy/paste thing.

If you were to do it any other way, you'd end up doing the following.

Gain 1 stress, and skip your action phase.

Roll 1 die and suffer the results, roll another die and suffer a crit if you roll one.

Both be able to attack and not attack at the same time.

Some people tried to argue that you still skipped your action step, but there's really no logical way to make that argument without including everything, not if you actually read the rules.