I don't know enough about networking so that I could answer your questions, but ...
... you brought it up already earlier. I was thinking of commenting back then, that your picture misses the key elements of creating subnets - DHCP servers what you have and where you don't have them.
R1 to my understanding, is a hardware piece that has a DHCP server (active) and gives addresses to a subnet. To my understanding R2 is PC of some kind and that gets the IP address from the R1 DHCP server. I don't see any other pieces of hardware in that subnet.
Your VMware is software running on R2 - that's the octopussy in the drawing. VMware (Pro or Player) has a couple of DHCP servers, which can be configured in Virtual Network Editor. That can be used if you load the Pro version - even if the Evaluation period will be exceeded and you use Player afterwards (or all the time since it is always installed too). I will NOT go into the discussion of Free everything-VMware and how they work and where to download those ... you need to look up the other discussions for that and also I haven't used any of that new stuff (sticking to commercial 17.5.2 which I have had for a long time).
Now, your R2-VMware has NAT Network. It is VMnet8 or something, see it from the Editor. ALL those computers belonging to this NAT network are in the same subnet. They CAN be connected to each other. Whether they WILL connect, just like that, depends on each operating system. Everybody will see physical computer. Physical computer might NOT see every NAT computer - because they might be copies and copies might have the same identity network-wise and that is a no-no and confuses the Windows Host. They will NOT have same IPs, not because they are in the NAT, unless you have used (the same) fixed ip-addresses.
Now that why physical computer might not see a NAT computer OR why NAT computers might not see each other - depends on the OS. With Windows, you have a "hosts" file, where you can say which ip is which computer - that will force that (and don't forget that you had them). If not obvious, NAT computers can change their IP depending on the Lease time. I usually don't care about the Lease time, but instead give them fixed IPs, they must be in the NAT address space, and then they will work "forever" and always see each other. IP is two-way - they need to see each other both ways, otherwise many IP-dependent thingies don't work. Don't be fooled by ping - that might work when you just edit the "hosts" file, however, something like Windows filesharing might NOT work, until you reboot (and there might be finer things than reboot to get it running). Now in Linux, like Kali, you have other things than the Windows HOSTS file (in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc) to do the same thing. You need to look that up from the particular distro (and yes, in Linux there certainly is a better way to restart the networking that rebooting the whole thing).
In VMware Host-only networking you can do basically the same thing, they say. I have never used that since then I couldn't get into interwebs from the VM computer and for me that would be a useless scenario. Maybe for you it would be an interesting scenario.
You can get into a computer in the same network as the Host, when in NAT VM, like with Windows-type-of-filesharing. That might be dependent on Host OS and setups, but generally speaking it works, if the Host is setup for that, too. This might not be anything you are now doing - but could be useful. Vice-versa, does not work by default - that's the minor protection of the subnet.
I hope this explains somewhat.