The Scientific Method
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I remember when I gave up on I Fucking Love Science. They had an article headline about "Scientists have discovered a way to reach Mars in 30 minutes".
My first thought was bullshit because Mars is 14 light minutes away when it is closest. So we apparently figured out how to travel damn near the speed of light and somehow stop.
When I read the article it was just a solar sail with a giant laser pointed at it. Old idea would take years to get up to speed and has no way to ever slow down.
Have never looked at their website again.
The 30 minute travel time claim is completely technologically illiterate, but you don't need to use beamed power for every step of a journey to make it useful. Not needing to use any fuel to ascend out of the Sun's gravity well still saves you a lot of mass.
I'm being slightly hyperbolic on the never slow down. If you want to use a solar sail to go near the speed of light (the claim of the article) you need just as much energy to slow down somehow. And you have to carry that energy on your ship.
You might be able to slow down on a gravity well but I'm getting out of my practical knowledge and into my scifi knowledge now.
Shit like that is why I love hard sci-fi and absolutely hate it when people treat bubblegum sci-fi concepts as something that could be done in real life. They don't seem to get the notion that however long it takes you to get up to cruising speed, it'll take you exactly that long to slow back down. There's a reason why the ships in The Expanse flip at midpoint in a flight and why the Starfury fighters in Babylon 5 can shift and skate in combat, and these mouth breathers don't seem to get why.