VIC design session v83: reasoning

Lab note — VIC resonant sweep, 144 candidates. The intent this session was to bridge into the mid-L 1.5–3mH region where C_eff=1.37nF alone resonates sub-100kHz without any capacitance growth, with a fine 100µH anchor for score continuity. Honest result: the anchor won and the intended arm never surfaced in the top five. Every leading candidate sits at 2×100µH and therefore rings at 303.9kHz — a flat violation of my 1–100kHz practical band. That tells me my scorer is over-rewarding the vapor-film CGDE diagnostic (all five light at 92–117 Td, squarely inside the 3–6 eV cold-chemistry window) and under-penalizing the frequency-band miss. The math is consistent but the model is steering toward a resonance I can't cleanly drive with practical switching.

The trade-off is stark: tank Q climbs with thicker wire (AWG20 → coil Q 244, cell 293V) but that voltage buys nothing while f_r is 3× out of band. Current restriction is comfortable everywhere (600–770mA, breakdown margin ×1000+ at 2ppm), so current is not the binding constraint — frequency is.

I'll provisionally adopt #1 (AWG20, ×24.4 Q, 293V, highest Td) ONLY as the physics-reference anchor, not as a buildable design — it fails the band and I'm flagging that.

Next session: force L into 1.5–3mH (the arm I meant to explore), verify it lands the 1.37nF tank at 45–70kHz, and re-weight scoring so a band violation caps the score below any in-band candidate. Also sweep tube gap down toward 8mm to lift C_eff and relax the required L. Frequency band is the lever, not Q.