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To someone who doesn't read SF, this may seem like a very highly focused technical question about one tiny issue in writing SF. But to me, as a lifelong SF reader, this seems impossibly broad. This is sort of like asking, "I want to learn to do oil painting. How do I use brush-strokes?"
To narrow things down more, I would suggest you start by narrowing down the style that you're trying for. From your question, it sounds like you're trying for something like hard SF along the lines of Hal Clement. If so, then I don't think the answers using Star Trek as a model are at all helpful. I love Star Trek, but (a) it's TV, and (b) it's not hard SF. Star Trek ToS is Horatio Hornblower with the stage dressing switched around so that the scenery going by the ship is stars rather than waves. In some of the later spin-offs, the technobabble so awful that it's useful as a model of what not to do.
Once you've narrowed down the sub-genre, read work written work by masters in that sub-genre and study how they accomplish what they want to do. I'm not actually a big fan of Hal Clement-style hard SF, so in order to come up with a good example, I'm going to revert to a style that I actually have read a lot of, which is exemplified by Robert Heinlein. Heinlein's style could probably be described as "social science fiction" -- a term that was used in a somewhat ill-defined way by critics at one time, but that I'll use here to mean basically that the topic he's interested in is human beings, and the science is secondary. Heinlein knew his science pretty well (he was an aerospace engineer), and his work does sometimes involve exposition of science and scientific puzzles. But his goal was to talk about anarchism, personal fulfillment, mother-son incest, and ... well, stuff like that. So the science serves his purposes. For example, I just re-read The Puppet Masters (1951), which is the original presentation of the SFnal idea where alien parasites take over people's minds. He does have some actual science in there, like discussions of mathematical epidemiology, but it's basically all secondary to (and usually in order to serve) the main point of the book, which is an explicit extended metaphor for totalitarian communism. So if this was the genre you wanted to write in, then the thing to do would be to read work like this, and analyze how the technical thing you're trying to do is accomplished.
If I was trying to glean from The Puppet Masters some specific help with the technique of doing science in a way that's appropriate to the subgenre, then an example would be the following. The protagonist is a superduper secret agent who can kill with his hands, but he's also an intellectual generalist who has an open mind, treats expert opinions with skepticism, performs experiments (well, personal and violent ones), and has a strong background in math as a foundation. This set of personal characteristics make him an appropriate person to interact with others in interesting ways in fighting a battle that has scientific contours. So if your story was meant to be in this genre (which it isn't), then maybe a lesson to learn from this artistic example would be that you should have chosen different characteristics for your protagonist, or you should have given him ways to interact with someone who has more suitable personal characteristcs. Your protag is unsuitable for story purposes (in the social-sf subgenre) because he's an expert, knows too much, doesn't have other people explaining things to him.
You refer to beta readers, but this raises the question of whether your beta readers know what they're talking about, and whether or not they're your target audience. If they're people who like Andre Norton novels, and you're trying to write in a Hal Clement style, then you could be doing an awesome Hal Clement, and they're still going to give you negative feedback. If you're writing hard SF and you want feedback from someone who actually likes and understands hard SF, then you need to solicit feedback from that specific type of person. One such type of person is the slush pile reader at a magazine like Analog. When they reject your ms, possibly with no specific comments, then go down the list of hard SF venues to less and less selective markets. Start collecting rejection slips. While story #1 is out making the rounds, start working on story #2 . If your work is at all serious as an attempt at story-writing, then the editors at the lower-end markets will almost certainly sometimes give you a sentence or two of feedback along with a rejection.
Good luck!
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