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What laser interlinks are the planning to use anyway? Do they plan on making their own, or to buy them?

I've helped with EDRS [1] and I can confidently assert that these things are everything but trivial to get to work well. The technology is so highly sophisticated on so many levels that I was quite literally shocked more than once during that time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Data_Relay_System

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I don't know about making their own lasers, but they are almost certainly making their own laser interlink system.

If there’s one thing that SpaceX/Tesla seem to universally excel at it is their electronics / board / chip design.

Listening to Sandy Munro rant about so many things he doesn’t like about how Tesla builds their cars, one thing he is awed by is their electronics.

I will say that they fucked up the eMMC chip in their first gen MCU though, people are out there unsoldering, cloning, and replacing the chip to try to bring back their cars from the dead to avoid paying ~$3k for a whole new MCU.

[1] - http://teslaservicemanual.com/2019/01/18/replacing-emmc-in-m...

Electronics alone is only one of many thing's they'll have to excel at to produce reliable laser terminals.

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