Primary tank cap. value

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Ted Gill by way of Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <tgill-at-sincom-dot-com>

I'm just starting to get involved with coiling and want to get my facts
straight before I build a coil to avoid doing something stupid.  I've been a
low-voltage electronics enthusiast for 3+ decades and was a Navy Electronics
Technician in my youth (many years ago)

My question is about setting the value of the tank capacitor in the primary
circuit.  The various (very cool) automated calculators appear to take the
apparent inductive reactance of the supply transformer secondary (e.g. 60ma
-at- 12kv -at- 60Hz for a NST) and use it to set the capacitive reactance and then
capacitance of the tank capacitor (based on TC-primary resonance).  Is this
done to ensure maximum energy transfer from the supply transformer secondary
into the TC-primary on each cycle of the main gap?

Thanks,
Ted Gill