Alright, so I've done a lot of googling and found old reports of similar issues that apparently have been fixed or improved, but I can't say the same appears to be the case on my end.

Not running on the most powerful hardware as it's a (gaming) laptop (i7, gtx675m/2gb, 16GB of ram) but I can run the game on good settings and get a stable frame rate (60+) for the most part (except when it's loading new stuff, or for some reason, if I'm collision-level close to an object as it blows up).

Yet when I enter some of the nebula regions or even look at them from the outside the frame rate absolutely tanks after a while, in some cases to single digit territory. This slowdown carries over if I dock with a station; the mouse in the interface will continue to lag even though I'm looking at the static screen of the station interface. Some of the nebulae appear to be worse than others; the worst offender I can think of is the one in the SW corner of the galaxy map (around Korkyra). Nothing I do in the settings seems to change this; I've tried turning off Fog, I've tried turning down Glow, Ambient Occlusion, Environments, and all the other effects to minimum, I've tried lowering the model and texture detail, rendering distance, but the problem persists. In some cases, it will run smoothly after changing the options in-game (the ones that can be changed without a restart) for a couple of seconds, before it starts to slow down and choke again. I've also tried playing directly with the settings from the nvidia drivers, to similar (lack of) effect.

So the question is, is anyone else experiencing similar issues, and more importantly, have you been able to fix it somehow? Or is it just something about my hardware that the game doesn't like and I am basically screwed?

That seems to be the same issue I'm having.

I bought the game recently and haven't had time for much testing but now that I read your post it does seem to happen on nebulae and near explosions. Sometimes framerate is so low it seems to have stopped working even though most of the time the game runs fine, even within nebulae, only slows down often enough to make it a chore to play the game.

In case this is of use to someone the machine I'm trying it on is an somewhat old PC: Intel Core 2 x 2.12GHz, 2GB RAM DDRII, nVidia Geforce GTS 450.

Starpoint Gemini 2 is not as hardware demanding as some other titles out there, but nevertheless, it is demanding.

RECOMMENDED:
OS: Microsoft Windows 7, 8
Processor: 3.0 GHz Dual core or equivalent
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: DirectX 11 compliant graphics card with 1GB RAM
DirectX: Version 11
Hard Drive: 8 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX compatible sound card

You have Minimum requirements (2GB RAM, 2GHz CPU, 1GB graphic RAM) which means that you should be able to play, but with low settings. We are still trying to optimize the game for low end machines and new update will be released soon on GoG (was released on Steam yesterday) which should help even further. Still, sometimes, when many ships spawn, and if you're near nebulae, you might experience some performance drops, unfortunately.

As for Erephine problem, who posted it first, I'm not sure what's happening, it should run fine on that configuration. Please, send us your log.txt and your save game to oliver@starpointgemini.com with a short description of the problem so we could try to see what's the problem.