I've been playing Cortex Command for a good while now. Dropships take about 20 seconds to arrive, walking is absurd, and many guns have such long reload times that I just never really bother with them. At least, that all used to be true. This morning while playing a normal skirmish, all of a sudden everything changed. The whole game got much faster - dropships came in the appropriate 3 seconds, walking is almost exciting, and a whole new range of weaponry has become practical. I don't understand any of it. I think I hit some button or something by accident. I have no idea what happened; all I know is that I have no more lag and the game is infinitely more fun.

Pretty sure thats ctrl+o

What does control+o do, exactly?

Same thing is happening to me.

Changes it from slow mo to frame skip.

It turns off the fancy dynamic time feature. By default,
if things get laggy, things go into slow-mo. If you hit
Ctrl+O then it turns into standard choppy-ness.

Looks like I've been ninja'd. Here's a slightly more complete explanation.
When you first start Cortex b22, Mac, or IGF, it is in framerate conservative mode. This slows down the timescale of your game in order to preserve a good framerate and prevent things skipping across the screen. Ctrl+O switches it to realtime mode, which does the opposite and forgoes framerate to play the game at 1.00x timescale.

Would this produce the same sinking through the floor problem as messing with the Settings.ini values?

Nope. For this, you're not changing the physics, but the timeframe in which they're calculated and rendered. Framerate conservative mode utilizes that special slowdown thing that Data made to slow down the physics calculations and keep the framerate reasonable. 1.00x timescale runs the physics as close to realtime as possible at the expense of rendering time.

Ooooo - neat!
The game is TOTALLY different now. It's great.

am i the only one who prefers it with timescaling on? i cant stand anything getting choppy <_<

I always use timescale mode, unless I'm taking gifs.

If I use anything other than timescale mode, it lags like hell.

Same here.

Aparrently, I'm running on average at 0.4~x timescale.

I prefer it with timescaling off, unless I use the PIGRAM.