To be fair, with all that talk of 'frequencies' and 'resonances' and 'shield harmonics' I can't really blame non-scientists for guessing that sound must be involved somehow.
There must be something about Star Trek which attracts these kinds of imbeciles. It's long been noted that there's a correlation between social outcasts and Star Trek; it may be that people who suck at science but still want to feel like they're part of the high-IQ crowd latch onto Star Trek fanboyism for that reason.
In my experience by far the worst are the Trek RPers, particularly the /online/ Trek RPers. Not that I have ever done this myself, but I have read a few of the relevant forums, usually when someone has emailed me a particularly amusing link. It doesn't even require the creativity that fanfics do, allowing rabid Trekkies to gather their Mary Sue characters together on massive wankships with no distractions to get in the way.
One of these people cornered me at a party I attended a couple of weeks back (Shef-Uni-Sci-Fi-Soc-alumni; most of whom are cool people). He described the campaign he was playing in based on the Wells-class timeships from 'Relativity' - those are the super-insane 29th century ships which are essentially unbeatable by the other canon ships. But oh no, apparently this was not enough for this guy, who spent half an hour telling me about the ludicrous gadgets this thing had piled onto it, with their bullshit technobabble explanations. The best one was the 'transphasic cloaking device that rendered the ship entirely invisible and invulnerable to damage for 15 hours, while still allowing full use of sensors and transporters, and also making it immune to timeline shifts like the temporal incursion ship'. When I suggested that this might be wank, he said 'oh no, it only lasts 15 hours, then it takes half an hour to recharge, though the ship can transwarp to an uninhabited sector of a low-threat time zone to do that'. So apparently with that key limitation it isn't wank at all!
At this point I tried to leave and sensing perhaps that I might be thinking the worse of him, he tried to convince me that he was in fact a modest and sane Trek RPer. Why? Because he was thinking of joining a TNG-era campaign that one of his friends wanted to run, which had the characters on a mere Ambassador class ship. He told me that everyone else they'd asked to join the game refused unless the ship was upgraded to at least a Sovereign (apparently the minimum standard of respectability, if they can't have one of their fanwank designs). Despite the campaign not being focused on starship combat. Fortunately he left right after that.
