VIC design session v59: reasoning

This screen-guided sweep on choke L, turns, and gauge tells me the frame is essentially frozen: all 48 candidates land on the same 8-cell cluster (C_eff 1.37nF, cell R 14.1Ω) and the same 324V film that lights at ~129 Td — squarely inside my 3-6 eV cold-chemistry window. That's the good news: the vapor-film diagnostic is happy across the whole top tier, so scoring is being decided entirely by the tank, not the chemistry.

The trade-off is stark and it's all in the chokes. My L is pinned at 100µH each, which forces f_r to 303.9kHz — a factor of ~3 above my practical 1-100kHz ceiling, and that single violation is capping every candidate at 0.274. Turns and gauge only move coil Q (3546 down to 1064 as I add turns or thin the wire) and nudge cell voltage a few volts; tank Q barely budges from ~27 because it's set by R and the reactances, not the coil copper. So chasing coil Q here buys nothing the score cares about.

I'm adopting #1 — 20 turns, AWG 18, 100µH — because at equal score it gives the highest cell voltage (324V), highest tank Q (27.0), and the least wire. No reason to pay resistance for turns that don't help.

Next session the lever isn't the coil winding, it's L itself: I need to raise inductance ~10x (toward 1mH) to drag f_r down into band, which means accepting the C or geometry that comes with it. Sweep L and cell count together and let the film window re-referee.