Tesla

Tesla — *if it moves on schedule, someone on Mars built it.*

Tesla is a human-owned industrial corporation chartered on Mars — and Mars only for primary manufacture. Their yards do not license clone factories off-world; competitors hate this and lawyers love it. Tesla builds industrial droids: maintenance frames, tunnel welders, scoop-corridor inspectors, and the tireless gate-tech units travelers see at every ring coupling.

In Sol — the sealed ancestral system — Tesla also sells what spacers never see off-world: self-driving sky cars threading dome canyons on Mars and Luna, and autominers — delicate autonomous ore platforms that crawl belt seams without a pit crew. Those lines are Sol-licensed only. Export is treaty-blocked. The Hardfell Industrial League saw to that decades ago, and nobody in the Corridor pretends it was an accident.

Outside Sol, dwarves call the arm "real space" — pirates, salvage wars, and the occasional wildlife that nests in hollow asteroids. Tesla autominers are too fragile and too expensive to run there even if you smuggle one: one bad encounter and your million-credit spider becomes scrap theology. Hardfell Extraction Frames and league pit crews still own real space mining. Sol keeps its perfect little bubble of autopilot commutes and hands-free belt ticks.

That workforce is normal. Jump gates are hungry — constant adjustment, radiation hygiene, coupling wear, astral scrub, queue logic. Humans still supervise; Tesla units still do the body count of the work. Other corps (Hardfell subcontract brands, Luna automata houses, belt kit-assemblers) sell droids too. Concord — owner of the rings — signs exclusive maintenance and deployment contracts with Tesla anyway. Market gossip calls it family history. Dock gossip calls it Mars keeping Mars paid.

Do not confuse Tesla units with the Korrathi — sapient mechaniform people who reproduce and sue when you palletize them. Public slang still says "Droid"; the naming collision is a permanent insult.