The rubes.. whales... enthusiastic backers are eventually going to run out of money to keep throwing at CR for SC. That is when the MVP will inevitably drop. He keeps diverting resources to developing strung together demos that either came from the dev studio/not-in-engine, a brief view of something "revolutionary" like the no head bob that is maybe in engine, or a combination of the two that has some clear areas of pre-scripted and pre-rendered recordings that are played in between some elements of in-game with faux-AI thrown in to bring in whatever money he can at/after conventions. This well will dry up sooner than later if the client side keeps at the miserable pace of released features. He got $124 million to build a game, not as profits to use for anything else - they are supposed to be solely going to game development. $124 million would be enough for many good game developers to produce a very good game and in 3 to 4 years with many of the features CR promised. Unfortunately CR is not a good game developer, so many dev hours have been literally thrown away that years of dev time have been lost. Literally years. All the work prior to the kickstarter, during the kickstarter, and up through 2014 if not early 2015 was tossed out or "refactored" (same difference) which is why for over half a year the Hangar Module was all there was. Literally just a static indoor environment with a static ship. Wow.
So finally some development begins, with lots of stuff dropped (Hangar Module with friends, Star Marine) and others delayed indefinitely (Persistent Universe and 2016 SC release, all jobs, all features except the 2 current missions) and just recently only has a second base been released. Supposedly once the engine was done, everything was going to come together quickly. That didn't happen. Supposedly after development pipelines churned out there first few pieces, development would be efficient and monthly updates would occur. Not happening.
Now at best this $124 million has churned out - in 4 years - 2 bases, 2 missions, half a dozen flyable ships that just do combat, a limited space area, and no real jobs or other in-game "professions" and CR is now proclaiming that for development to continue he needs even more money. $124 million got only to what is available on the client today, and he is already claiming he needs more money for development to keep going.
That's a pretty good idea of what the MVP is if funding were to slow to a trickle soon.
