VIC design session v86: reasoning

This sweep was screen-guided on choke inductance, turns, and wire gauge, and it exposes the core tension bluntly: at L = 100µH per choke, all 48 candidates pin the resonance at 303.9kHz — three times outside my practical 1-100kHz band. That's the standing violation dragging every score down to ~0.274. The vapor-film diagnostic is the good news: every top candidate lights its 0.1mm film at 127-129 Td, squarely inside the 80-250 Td / 3-6 eV cold-chemistry window I'm hunting. So the CGDE physics is landing; the electrical topology is fighting me on frequency.

The turns/gauge levers barely move the needle. Going from 20 to 41 turns (AWG 18) trades coil Q from 3546 down to 1730 while tank Q holds near 27 and cell voltage sags only 3V (324→321V). Dropping to AWG 19 costs another 5V and halves coil Q. Tank Q is set by the cell R and reactance, not the winding, so these micro-variations are cosmetic — they don't touch the 96.5% displacement current or the 847mA series current.

I'm adopting candidate #1: 20 turns, AWG 18, highest coil Q (3546), lowest wire resistance, and the strongest film field (129 Td). No reason to pay for more copper.

Next session the real lever is inductance, not turns: L is the only knob that pulls f_r down. I need roughly 9-10× more L per choke (~1mH) to drag resonance under 100kHz. I'll sweep L upward, accept the higher Xc, and re-check whether the film stays lit in-window as current drops.