I've been able to get in game now and had the following experiences:
Took the 400 out for a spin launched from Babbo and touched down at Tessler to set it as spawn, then set off to find the river. Could not change the navigation waypoint so tried to get out of my seat and couldn't do that either. Had to ALT+F4 out of the game.
Tried to get back into the game and had two 60015 server full errors in a row.
Third time was the one I was going to give up but got lucky and into the server - was on Tessler and my ship and armour with my food/drink in were still equipped which was a relief.
Looked online and saw if you flew 437km from Babbage on a 205 heading you'd hit the one single river in the game right now and I did so want to visit it, so rose to 22 thousand meters and jammed it over there at about 1000m/s. About seven minutes later I see a snaking blue line below me on a background of brown temperate earth. Thank goodness those clouds were not obscuring the ground there or I'd have buzzed right past it.
While coming in, I saw there was a Carrak on its back by the name of DKR Dresden or something like that. I raised a query on F12 if they wanted help but it de-spawned immediately. No worries.
I flew to the source in the nearby mountains and back down to the little lake at the end of the river. From the sky it doesn't look very long, flying it is doesn't seem that long, but I parked my ship on the small beach on the lake and intended to walk the river but just walking round the late to the mouth of the river put things in perspective. Walking it is going to be one of those "I have nothing but free time today" activities.
One question I do have about this river and lake is what, exactly, is the composition of the liquid in it? It was between minus 7 and minus 8 all the time I was there and there was no sign of the water freezing so one suspects it may not be pure H2O or it has some other factor stopping it from turning solid...?
Returning to Tessler to log off I spotted the 400 sat all foreboding through the airshield in the shadow of Microtech... When the elevator finally showed up,
it had to wait for
me to get this screenshot.
In terms of Frames Per Second, it's a little smoother, maybe +2 or +3 fps but the old machine I have is limited by the age and performance of the parts so not much more other than replacing the computer is going to improve my experience (FX8350, RX570 4gb etc) but the game still runs and thats all I need for an Alpha :)