alt Hacker NewsMy intuition is that the extra mass for the receivers would be a large negative in terms of travel time (1/sqrt(m) penalty assuming you can give each probe fixed kinetic energy).
Plus keeping a probe as active part of a relay is a major power drain, since it will have to be active for a substantial percentage of the whole multi-decade journey and there's basically no accessible energy in interstellar space.
Then again, it's still far from clear to me that sending any signal from a probe only a few grams in size can be received at Earth with any plausible receiver, lasers or not.
Thoughtful intuitions all around. My understanding is that lasers don't necessitate the big reception dish, but instead have a 1m or smaller reflective telescope. The laser setup is lighter, lower power and gas precedent in modern space missions.
Probes I suspect would realistically have to be large enough to send strong signals over long distances, so weightier than a few grams.
I think 99% downtime is an existing paradigm for lots of space stuff, e.g. NASA's DSOC and KRUSTY, so room for optimism there.
Though I think I agree with you that an energy payload as well as general hardware reliability are probably the bottlenecks over long distances. I have more thoughts on this that probably deserve a seperate post (e.g. periodic zipper-style replacements that cascade through the whole relay line) but to keep this on honoring the Voyager, I will say for the Voyager is at least for me huge for opening my imagination for next steps inspired by it.