You just admitted that vitamin C is a real treatment with zero side effects and then somehow manage to claim that there are no others like it because “real treatments always have side effects”. There are certainly a lot of useless “treatments” out there with false claims, but that doesn’t make this article’s blanket…

They’ve already made all the calculations and designed the engines that are needed to support the payloads that have been proposed. Why make it smaller? I think that could be explained by the fact that technology has improved quite a bit since the spaceships you speak of were designed and implemented.