Phasers and Ray Guns
BY: Starship Enterprise Junior Weapons Officer ZeroBear PolyBear

You probably already knew this, but here it is again. Space is absolutely full of scarey stuff.

There is only one suitable defense against such dangers and no respectable space PolyBear would be caught without his trusty:

No... Wait ... I'm not sure where that came from. It just popped up and now I can't get rid of it. Actually no self respecting space PolyBear would be caught without his trusty:

Yeah. That's the trick. His trusty ray gun - every SpacePolyBear needs a trusty ray gun! Although they don't seem to have any of the Model 12 Farnzeworth Blastaway Rayguns like that baby shown above, they do have a nice assortment of ray guns here on the Enterprise.

However, Captain Kirk is a real stick in the mud when it comes to qualification requirements for carrying any of these babies. First, you must pass a safety quiz.

 

That's me way back there in the back with the confuzzeled look on my face. I quickly evaluated this examination and gave it to old "Glance to the Left, Glance to the Right. Cheat off the smarter looking of the two" method of examination completion. Unfortunately I scored an 81, which indicates how dumb some smart looking people actually are. But anything over 80 is a passing score for a D level Ray Gun so I'm not all that upset. Still, I have my pride and it would have been nice to ace the exam. Oh, well. Next comes Target practice:

 

With the exception of one minor misshap:

I think I did pretty good on my range test. Evidently Kirk, who evaluates all ray gun qualifications thought otherwise because

This is what he gave me after the qualification. I didn't even get a quick draw leather holster and spare cartridges. I was not impressed.

How am I supposed to protect the Enterprise against that thing above with a friction powered ZapBrannigan Atomic Ray gun? Kirk better hope he doesn't get eaten up by a bug, cause I'm not gonna be able to help him when he gets his keester in a crack.

Maybe I can sneak his weapons room key away from him while he's sleeping or in the Johnny Pot room. I wonder if Uhura would order me one off the interwebs? Mumzie's paypal account seems to have some sort of overdraft problem. Maybe I shouldn't have ordered that nifty

Model 12 Farnzeworth Zippie-do-dah personal shuttle craft last week. Turns out I gotta qualify to drive it, too.

Sheeesh - Space rules are the pits!