QCW

Quasi-continuous wave

QCW ramps the supply rather than switching it on flat, so the arc grows instead of appearing and comes out straight and smooth rather than branching. It is a mode, not a topology. Usually it is put on a DRSSTC, where the tank is tuned and the timing has to be tracked the whole way up the climb; it is also put on a single resonant coil, where it goes by ramped SSTC or QCW SSTC. That one is the simpler machine and the easier place to start: no tank capacitor, so nothing stores a bang and nothing runs away, and the current in the bridge is only ever the current the bridge made. What it gives up is length, and a good deal of it: the part left out is most of what makes a DRSSTC's arc long. Loneoceans' ramped SSTC gets twelve inches off a five inch secondary; the QCW DRSSTC beside it gets seventy off five and a half. Nearly the same coil, and nearly six times the arc. Two machines rather than one machine twice, though: they differ in the bus and the bridge as well as in the tank, so read it as the gap between two real builds and not as what removing one capacitor costs. Either way the ramp costs the same thing, which is that nothing stays still: the frequency falls as the arc loads the secondary, the current climbs, and every timing figure that was a number on a flat burst becomes a curve across the ramp.