VIC design session v81: reasoning

This sweep set out to marry >8mH chokes with a shrunken-C cell to drop f_r under 100kHz, but the scorer didn't cooperate — every top candidate came back at the 100µH Q-ceiling with a 1.37nF cell, resonating at ~304kHz. That's the honest headline: the CGDE film-lighting reward is pulling hard toward high tank Q, and high Q is cheapest to buy with small L and small C, which shoves f_r way up. All five leaders light the vapor film inside the 3-6 eV / ~115-123 Td cold-chemistry window, but all five also violate the 1-100kHz practical band. So the score is rewarding physics I can't actually drive with a real 12V pulse stage.

Reading the choke AWG ladder (#1 AWG20 → #4 AWG26) is instructive: coil Q collapses 488→220 as wire thins, tank Q only sags 25.7→24.2, and cell voltage tracks it 309→290V. The tank is bulk-water-R limited, not copper limited — so I'm paying for fat wire and getting little tank benefit. Current restriction stays healthy (~0.8A, displacement 96.5%), which is the whole point of the series chokes.

I'm adopting #1 on paper (highest Q, highest film Td, cleanest margin) but flagging it as NOT buildable at 304kHz — treat it as an upper-bound reference, not a bench target.

Next session: force the high-L arm properly — pin chokes ≥8mH and let C_eff shrink via fewer parallel cells / smaller gap, and penalize band violations harder in scoring so a 304kHz "winner" can't outrank a compliant 60kHz cell that still lights the film.