Originally posted by Lynx
IIRC WMCoolmon's in cutscene stuff you can abort them by keypress.
All the cutscenes SEXPs I've written just modifies a certain aspect, eg fade-in, set-fov, set-camera-position. The player still has full access to the controls, but shouldn't be able to change anything with the cutscenes. It's up to the FREDder to provide an 'exit' key, because there's no way to account for what ships should be where after the cutscene.
I think there might be mission-stuff which is precached as part of the game starting up, and then a secondary load for the specific mission assets.... so you'd still need to wait for that on top of the load time you see loading a mission in campaign/techroom.
The stuff that's loaded on game start are mostly the tables. The loading time could be cut down because only ships, weapons, and effects used in the mission would have to be loaded. No need to load all the HUD gauges for example. Thanks to taylor's work on -loadonlyused the loading time's been reduced a fair amount, but it's still pretty large.
So it'd be a little less than the normal loading time, but yeah, it'd basically be the time to get to the pilot screen plus the time to load a mission.