Greetings CMDRs,
the fact that problems are at particular settlements and not at others seems to point out that something differs in the complexity of the scene the CPU and GPU have to render, can be number of polygons and culling to calculate, can be amount of textures and lighting to be applied to the objects, or both.
I noted certain settlements have buildings that seem more ‘elaborate’ than others, while others are more complex with higher buildings variety, these environments may require more computational and rendering cycles than others hence causing the frame rate to drop more in those locations.
Also, when we are on the border of a settlement looking towards it, the scene viewed contains more building/objects than when we are inside it because obviously some will be behind us or on the sides so not visible, hence less calculations are needed.
It can also be possible that some buildings have been more optimized than others (less polygons and texture required to render them still being nice looking) possibly because created by different, more skilled modeling people.
As for the pause when exiting the spaceship, I think the settlement seen from the ship as 3D model is less complex than the same settlement seen when on foot (because we can move much closer) hence I think the pause time is needed by the game engine to load into video memory the new geometry information and textures.
If to a scene we add moving characters (AI soldiers, scavengers, etc) I bet the amount of calculations required for the rendering increases a lot (3D models of humans are much more complex by the buildings). This could be prevented with a clever variation of level of details with distance.
These behaviours are very similar with that of flight simulator games that I am playing since a long time, for example a pause for scenery loading when approaching a dense urban scenery after a flight over bush or simpler landscape, or stuttering during steep turns when the lateral scenery comes quickly into view.
Hope this speculation makes some sense…
o7