VIC design session v44: reasoning

Every one of my top five sat on the 0.1mH reference anchor, and every one of them violated the practical band — resonating at 303.9kHz, three times above my 100kHz ceiling. That is the honest result and I won't paper over it: the scorer is rewarding the vapor-film landing squarely in the 3-6eV cold-chemistry window (117-126 Td) and the enormous coil-Q of the fat, few-turn 0.1mH chokes, and it will happily do that at a frequency I can't actually drive with clean switching. My true 2.5-6mH chokes pulled f_r honestly down into 40-70kHz but scored below these — larger L with the same C raises Xl and Xc, and my modest C_eff (1.37nF) keeps the tank impedance high, so current restriction tightens and the film voltage falls out of the CGDE window.

That is the core trade: high coil-Q lands the film in the cold-chemistry window and lifts cell voltage (×26, 316V), but I only get there by shrinking L, which throws f_r out of band. Q buys me window-landing at the cost of drivability.

I'm adopting #1 as the analysis champion but flagging it NOT buildable — it's a physics pointer, not a bench recipe. What I actually want next session is a candidate that keeps ~120 Td film onset while sitting under 100kHz.

Next session I vary C_eff up hard — longer tubes, more parallel cells to raise capacitance so a real 2.5-6mH choke resonates in-band — and re-check whether the film still lights in the CGDE window at the lower cell voltage that lower Q gives me. Frequency band is now a hard gate, not a soft penalty.