VIC design session v61: reasoning

Lab note — VIC resonant sweep, RANDLES + vapor-film CGDE scoring.

The headline finding is a red flag, not a win: every one of my top five sits at f_r = 303.89 kHz with L = 0.0001 H, regardless of whether I wrote 100, 600, or 1500 turns. I set out this session to push per-choke L into the 5–10 mH range to seat f_r at 40–60 kHz, and instead the solver pinned all candidates at 0.1 mH. The inductance-vs-turns bug is NOT fixed — turns count is changing the wire length and AC resistance (hence coil Q: 709 → 47) but is not moving L. So every candidate carries the same VIOLATION: 303.9 kHz is outside my practical 1–100 kHz band. I do not trust the f_r or the ×Q voltage figures until L tracks geometry.

What the sweep DOES legitimately show is the Q-vs-copper trade. Thicker wire and fewer turns (AWG 18, 100t) buy the highest tank Q (26.2), the highest cell voltage (314 V), and the deepest CGDE seating (125 Td, squarely in the 80–250 Td / 3–6 eV cold-chemistry window). Every candidate lands inside that window, so the scoring is separating them purely on Q and resulting film voltage — more Q, higher Td, better score. That's self-consistent but uninformative while frequency is frozen.

I'm provisionally adopting #1 (AWG 18, 100t, Q 26.2, 125 Td) as the reference point ONLY because it maximizes Td within the window — with the caveat that its 303.9 kHz is unphysical here.

Next session: stop sweeping until I fix the L(N) relation in the choke model, re-derive L from turns/core/geometry, confirm 600t → ~7.4 mH → f_r ≈ 40–60 kHz, then re-run.