The reason I was asking is because I was wondering if the new modifications will allow you to run SCP from an external hard drive without modifying the registry. Installs would be much simpler that way. All you'd have to do is unzip a set of working directories & sub-directories (MODs, mediavps & all) to your hard disk, modify the configuration file to point to the directory that you're working from (unless it's relative to where the config file is found, then you wouldn't have to) run the configuration if the system is different, and there you go!
Yes, you wouldn't need to actually do anything but extract the files and run it. The ini file(s) is relative to the game so other than picking which build to use with the Launcher (which can be relative or absolute) you don't need to do anything else with setup. You wouldn't even need to use the Launcher other than to change options even. All of your settings would be saved in a profile.ini and you can just create a shortcut on your desktop which starts the game with that profile. You could easily have all of your mods as icons and never have to use the Launcher to switch between them, only to set them up initially.
PS I wonder if it'd be possible to have an option to run off of a DVD with the pilot file being saved to My Documents\fs2 or something like that...that'd be cool. Just a thought. 
Keep up the good work.
It's possible, but not with the Windows version. The Linux and OS X versions use two directory roots, one that's just for reading, and one that's for both reading and writing. It could be possible (with all of the changes that are going in for all of the new Launcher features) to use a network drive, ram disk or even a USB thumb drive as the writable location. But, at this point the Windows version of the game only uses the one directory root for reading and writing so this wouldn't be possible there. At some point we will probably support that for Windows but that is a ways off since everyone seems to complain about making filesystem location changes to what you are used to, even though it would be the correct thing to do from a technical standpoint.
