> The laser part seems easy, the targeting part seems hard. I'm imaging some type of gimbal, is there a better way?

Here's the design 101 from base principles:

In practice, you need a big-ish telescope on both ends to control beamspread and to collect light from a big aperture. Aperture is a given based on link budget (and you can trade off power to make the aperture smaller, but halving the aperture diameter on both sides means you'll need 16x the power); if you target F/2 then it'll be twice as long as the aperture. Maybe think about a 6cm aperture and 12cm long telescope for a starting point. This will get you a 6 arcsecond wide beam @ 1000nm.

Then, you need to slew this at pretty fast rates-- perhaps 15 degrees per second for acquisition, and control the pointing within 3 arcseconds while tracking at peak rates of a few degrees per second. Yeek! This pretty quickly takes you towards some kind of direct drive fork mount that is very gimbally-looking.

One bit of fun is that you need to have a lot of bandwidth on your reaction control system on the spacecraft, too-- because when you snap one of these telescopes around, the whole craft is going to want to counterrotate, so the reaction control wheels (and/or other telescopes for links in other directions) will need to react. Feedforward is advised.

I was thinking of a gimbal to point the laser, but now that you've introduced mini telescopes and the jerk plus reaction control systems on the rx side of this equation I'm out. For inter-sat comms directional / beam formed RF feels like a better solution. The only reason you'd go for lasers here is thin civilian cover for developing a weapons platform.

> For inter-sat comms directional / beam formed RF feels like a better solution.

You can't get the same degree of directivity. As wavelength decreases, you get more directivity for a given aperture. Light has 1/5000th the wavelength of plausible radio links, so both the sender and the receiver can have much higher gains. You also can have much more bandwidth, and thus you obtain many orders of magnitude higher data rates per unit of power used.

E.g. a 6cm telescope has 82dB of gain on each side for 1000nm light.

A 1 meter aperture (about what a 3.2x1.6x0.2m Starlink satellite can likely present to another satellite) has 53dB of gain on each side.

So for equivalent power, you have 6 orders of magnitude more signal strength, and you can occupy 10x the bandwidth, too, even if you have a very large phased array.

> The only reason you'd go for lasers here is thin civilian cover for developing a weapons platform.

This kind of system has very little in common with how I would build an anti-satellite laser system.