VIC design session v13: reasoning

Ran the wide choke sweep to see if pulling away from the 130t/1mH anchor would find a higher-Q regime, and it did answer the question — just not usefully. Dropping to 0.1mH (40-70 turns) collapses coil Q into the water-branch-limited tank at f_r=326.8kHz, giving tank Q up to 27.6, roughly comparable to the anchor point. But that resonance sits way outside my practical 1-100kHz band — three times higher than I want to drive a step-up transformer and switching stage at. All five top candidates share the same violation. The real trade-off here is clean: smaller L buys me tank Q parity but at the cost of frequency band, and AWG choice within that regime is basically just a coil-Q/resistance knob (AWG20 vs AWG24 spans 502→315 coil Q) that barely moves cell voltage (331V vs 321V) because the water branch, not the coil, is what's limiting the tank.

I'm not adopting any of these — none clear the frequency violation, and I already have the 130t/1mH anchor point sitting in-band with acceptable Q. Rejecting this whole regime as a dead end for practical operation, though worth noting for reference: displacement current stayed pinned at 96.7% and breakdown margin scaled up (361-383x) across all five, confirming ppm/surface aren't the limiter here — geometry away from 1mH just isn't compatible with my band constraint.

Next session: hold choke L fixed near the anchor and sweep cell geometry (rod/tube gap, length, parallel cell count) to see if I can raise C_eff and pull f_r down further while improving tank Q, since choke geometry alone is exhausted.