MOC analysis: Nick Trotta's Chain Reaction RVR-05

Arno Knobbe returns today with another mathematical analysis; this time of an actual LEGO® model and the popular 2025 element that it uses: the "ring pop".

©2025 Nick Trotta. reproduced with permission

2026… The turn of the calendar marks fresh ambitions, new elements, more LEGO® geometry articles, but also the annual release of Nick Trotta’s latest spaceship! If, against the odds, you’re not familiar with Nick’s work, over the years his ships have taken the art of ABS spaceship-building to the brink of rocket science – and with each new build, however few and far between, he continues to push that envelope.

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His latest creation, Chain Reaction RVR-05, imagines a new ship which could fit into the classic shoot 'em up franchise Thunder Force from the late 1980s, so there’s a definite old-school video game vibe to this build – but executed with the latest LEGO parts and clever building techniques. Nick's creation stays true to the the design language seen across the game series, and draws shaping inspiration from a sleek and spiky concept by Sparrow S.A., while injecting plenty of his own signature style. Although New Elementary normally doesn’t review MOCs, we gladly make an exception for Nick’s work, knowing we’ll get the usual entertaining building techniques and Nice/New Parts Usage. Let’s dive in…

Ship overview

Before getting down to the nitty-gritty, let’s walk around the ship and take in its interplay of angles. The overall configuration might appear classical at first glance – a central fuselage flanked by two “outrigger” cannons – but almost everything else defies convention. As followers have come to expect from Nick, there are visual sleights of hand and clever structural tricks wherever you look.

©2025 Nick Trotta. reproduced with permission

Color, as always, plays a central role. Although the core palette is relatively restrained (consisting of blue, white, and a selection of greys), the model quietly includes no fewer than 23 distinct colors. Because the design is so visually dense, it might take you a good while to spot them all.

The fuselage is predominantly executed in crisp color-blocking in blue and white. The fore-aft boundary between these colors runs across the ship to visually tie the different components together. But where a lesser builder (say, myself) might lean too heavily into this effect, Nick confidently interrupts the blue with pointed white sections and the occasional splash of orange. It’s this careful tension between discipline and deviation, between method and a hint of madness, that keeps the design fresh and modern.

©2025 Nick Trotta. reproduced with permission

As we get to the side of the ship, more of its aggressive geometry is revealed. The massive tail fin at the back has a radical sweep-back that is matched by the dorsal fin tucked underneath the main hull. Who lines up an airfoil against the flow – madness! This viewing angle also reveals two barbed sections (the black barb at the front and the blue LEGO® Technic fin further back) that add a touch of 1980s punk to this otherwise sleek and aerodynamic build.

Coming around the back, more of the radiating angles come into view. It’s here that we also get a first glimpse of some of the build’s visual tricks. I love how the LEGO Technic panel fairing, with its concave cutout, is seamlessly integrated through matching curved slopes. Nick’s faux-functional struts are always a pleasure to see, and the garage roller door section (4218) with custom decal, which we’ll discuss in detail below, adds a dose of production value. And is that an ‘80s LEGO Technic ski (2713) I spot there?

While Nick’s art typically lacks traditional play features, it’s nonetheless filled to the brim with seemingly functional sci-fi machinery. And his latest build is no exception. The outrigger cannon shown here exemplifies his distinctive brand of plausible decorative technology, going far beyond the genre’s more familiar random greebling.

Ring Pop (5264)

An avid follower of New Elementary, Nick loves to experiment with newly released parts. In last year’s model R-104 Metal Heart for instance, he went to town with the D-SNOT brick (3386). This time around, the element under scrutiny was the versatile Plate, Round 1 x 1 with Clip on Bottom (5264), or as some are starting to call it, the ring pop. 

In the remainder, we’ll see how Nick has employed this fun part (68 in total!) throughout the ship in more ways than you could imagine. 

At New Elementary, the wonders of this long-awaited part were already examined by Eero Okkonen in his review of 10343 Mini Orchid. Let’s first revisit some of the tricks this versatile part has to offer.

At the core, the ring pop is just an inverted Tile, Modified 1 x 1 with Open O Clip (15712, 44842). 

Where the tile with clip (in white) allows you to attach bar elements on top of things, the ring pop (in blue) lets you attach them to the bottom. Reasoning from the clip’s end, if you attach a ring pop to a bar, this exposes a stud – way more practical than the anti-stud its distant cousin does.

The other crucial difference is that the actual round plate of the ring pop is very slender – only 1 mm, not counting the stud – whereas the tile with clip is a more standard 2 LU thick (3.2 mm). This makes it more compact and inconspicuous, offering many opportunities in the tight quarters of a spaceship than the tile with clip does. 

The compact design of the ring pop is such that the distance between the plate’s top and the center of the clip is 2.5 LU, in other words, exactly half a module.

Instead of a stack of 1×1 SNOT bricks (above, left), the ring pop can act as an impromptu SNOT stud – not just for the cardinal directions, but for any orientation needed.

The ring pop shares a lot of its design DNA with the Plate, Round 1 x 1 with Bar Handle on Long Stem (79194). The bar’s centerline also lies 2.5 LU away from the top of the plate, such that the two siblings can buddy up in a 5×5×5 LU cube (above, right).

In a more regular studs-up configuration, the ring pop and its thicker relative the tile with clip can jointly cover the height of a regular brick (6 LU) but they need to connect through a bar (you could theoretically have them “hold hands”, but that’s not a connection that TLG encourages). 

The ring pop’s slender design allows you to discreetly sprinkle clips wherever they’re needed. 

Placing them underneath parts is the self-evident move, but you can also pop a bit of ring in LEGO Technic pin holes (beware, thin legal ice here!) and other anti-studs, such as in Erling bricks or fences.

Over the next sections, we’ll encounter increasingly tricksy uses of the ring pop.

Tail Fin

The design feature that jumped out to me when first beholding the ship was that giant swept tail fin with the serrated spine.

The tail fin elegantly continues the cockpit’s subtle upward slope, while its radical sweepback suggests supersonic speed. The serrated spine forms a nice and edgy contrast to the fin’s most striking part usage: the LEGO Technic rotor blade (65422) with custom decals. This element has a subtle taper and rounded corners, ideal for an airfoil like this.

Sandwiched between the two rotor blades sits a 1-module-wide wedge – rounded below, capped with gable roof slopes above. Might there be some oversized Pythagorean triangle hiding under that rotor blade?

But wait, what’s this? Those are not integer distances along the horizontal and vertical leg, no matter what unit you choose! Turns out Nick has gone non-Pythagorean, in order to tilt the spine to just the right angle within the confines of the fin. Have a look at the little subassembly constructed from the yellow and red clip. The yellow clip is securely connected to the white base, but the red clip is allowed to slide horizontally by virtue of the espresso handle, cleverly absorbing any irrationality – no clip-based trigonometric heroics required, alas.

I couldn’t resist checking whether a classic Pythagorean triangle might fit the required slope. It turns out that (16, 63, 65) fits the bill quite well, within 0.1° from the target angle. This candidate has the added bonus that the hypotenuse is a multiple of 5 LU, or 1 module (never mind the fact that the spine is constructed in multiples of 6 LU). I was able to construct such a classical triangle, but it turned out to be too bulky for the limited space available inside the fin. Nick’s solution turned out to be optimal (no surprises there).

Nick: “The new inverted clip was an ideal solution for an acute angle in the sharply raked tail frame due to limited available space. I then needed to precisely line up the visible end of the tail fin [where the bracket stud abuts the ingot] while also matching the angle of the rotor blades overlaid on the sides [see below]. It was a messy, out-of-System problem; perfect for a sliding bar solution. This pattern worked great, and made it super easy to knock out additional explorations for different rakes.”

 

On either side of the fin, you can recognize a black hockey stick (93559). Besides adding a bit of visual interest to the tail fin, these sticks play a structural role in pushing the rotor blades against the center assembly. The blades being long and thin, they may have a slight bend to them. Of course, the slender ring pops provide an efficient mount for these hockey stick tensioners.

Ring pop power-up

The ring pop truly comes into its own when combined with plates that have a bit of bar attached to them, such as the espresso handle (32828) and the round plate with bar arm down (3661). 

Here we see the ring pop teaming up with the espresso handle to allow the red tile to be offset by an arbitrary amount, from right up against the white tile (in-grid), to about half a module to the right. The tiny gap this creates can produce a fun visual gimmick, or perhaps the red tile needs to scoot over to the right to meet up with some other part. The below shot of the ship’s cowling is a good demonstration of this off-grid sliding trick:

In this example, the sliding bit is the white triangular tile. Normally, this tile would sit right next to the white wedge tile below it, but here, it’s pushed up against the white slope on the other side, with an attractive slit to boot.

The bar of the espresso handle adds another degree of freedom to the ring pop. The ring pop itself allows rotation around its stud, and this translational freedom additionally allows the ring to be slid in and out. What other possibilities might this combo offer?

The example in the top right shows how to achieve an offset perpendicular to the first. This exploits the fact that you can rotate around both the espresso handle’s stud and the ring’s stud: the handle is now diagonal. A small amount of sliding then lets you bring the two tiles closer together – or keep them apart, if that suits your design. At the front, the arbitrary translation is applied to a case that normally demands an “irrational” offset, such as aligning the red tile against the white triangle. Finally, combining two rotations and a translation allows you to position the red tile as if it were hinged from the white tile (lower right). 

Note that we haven’t even employed the fourth degree of freedom here: rotating the ring around the bar to tilt the plane. We’ll see some of these higher-depth-of-field constructs further below.

Cockpit

As is customary for Nick, the cockpit is a dense little knot of SNOT work, micro-offsets, and carefully massaged alignments.

The top half is constructed from trans-green parts, the tapering of which is matched by the trans-green strip at the cockpit’s nose, and the blue fuselage beneath it. A subtle bit of alignment occurs in the sections just left and right of the pilot, where the blue panels (15207, 35255, 5720) are offset by 1 LU horizontally, and 2 LU vertically, to contain the trans-green edge of the cockpit proper. But wait, trans-green parts?

Nick: “Like other New Elementary fanatics, I savor parts availability in fresh colors as it unlocks new design possibilities. But here I did something heretical, and individually tinted each of the 21 trans-clear parts in the canopy assembly with an airbrush. It’s not perfect, but the recolor was important for my source inspiration, the Thunder Force games series. Here’s hoping we see more transparent greens from TLG for us spacers in the future!”

Ring pops, in conjunction with round plates with bar, are central to the positioning of the two trans-green bands along the nose, as demonstrated in this color-coded render:

This powerful combo affords rotation around two vertical axes – one around the round plate’s stud, the other around its vertical bar that is one module away from the first axis. Because the axes sit so close together, twisting the round plate around its stud subtly pushes the top ends of the blue and red beams in or out, giving very fine control over the taper of the nose. The second axis of rotation then ensures that the tip aligns cleanly with the front of the nose. Friction keeps things in place.

Nacelles

The two degrees of freedom of the above construct allow subtle alignment and angling, but the action is still confined to the plane. Nick kicks it up a gear in the nacelles, where two little subassemblies below the big blue wedge need to be aligned with surgical precision.

This alignment involves subtle rotations around no less than four axes, which, combined, allow the subassemblies to be both canted and properly aligned to the wedge’s twin diagonals. From the inside, these rotations are: around the anti-studs of the D-SNOT bricks, around the SNOT stud of those bricks, around the bars of the espresso handles, and around the studs of the ring pop. There’s actually a fifth degree of freedom (translational, this time), since the ring pop can be slid along the espresso handle’s bar. Did I mention how useful these ring pops can be?

The nacelle features plenty of other attention-grabbing details. Right behind said blue wedge, we encounter two white dormers (3049c), each sloped 45 degrees. Between these, there is exactly enough room for a fun metallic silver quarter tile, followed by stacks of roller skates. 

Following the struts towards the back, we encounter yet another opportunity for ring pops, when it comes down to attaching the blue “109” garage roller door section (4218). These doors being hinged gives them a nice bank right off the bat. But the design also calls for them to be slightly tapered towards the back. The ring pops at the front are spaced two modules apart, and those at the back only one, so each door forms the hypotenuse of a very acute right triangle. It won’t come as a surprise that this distance is annoyingly irrational, but minute translation along the two bars of the garage doors absorbs this. No trouble at all!

Cannons

While not especially complex from a technical standpoint, the outrigger cannons stand out as a nice piece of visual storytelling. The metallic armor plates (28220) pair perfectly with the angled black hinge plates. The grey-and-blue cylinders along the flank hint at some functional role, perhaps a pneumatic recoil damper or a futuristic railgun charge accumulator – no one really knows (not even Nick). And the black scutums (Roman shields, 98367) complete the story, quietly suggesting that you probably shouldn’t touch the guns after firing.

There’s a supporting role for a ring pop at the back of the long hinge plate. This role is more for entertainment rather than structural purposes. The ring pop’s grip on the angled hinge plate is technically legal, but too loose to be practical. Instead, the plate is perched on three studs.

Finally, the cannon has a trick up its armored sleeve. Those armor plates at the front seem to secure the nozzle, yet the entire black–yellow–blue section is completely free-floating! The concave inner geometry of the armor plates traps the blue LEGO Technic hubs and espresso handles from both sides, so the nozzle can’t budge. If Nick hadn’t pointed it out, I would have missed it!

Nick: “It’s a trap! This is one of those super fun fits you couldn’t possibly find without just messing with parts on the workbench. The interior space of the armor plates fits elegantly around the curved espresso plates, and prevents the attached log brick (the laser cannon “output coupler”) from moving in any direction. Feels very playful!”

Conclusion

Chain Reaction RVR-05 is another standout build by master spacer Nick Trotta and a clear highlight in his substantial oeuvre. With every build, he aims to evolve, unlocking new levels through the clever adoption of newly introduced LEGO parts – though the older ships still hold up beautifully (for instance, my personal favorites R-104 Metal Heart and Heavenly Strike). It’s tempting to wish for a higher release frequency, but models this sculptural and meticulously engineered simply need time to mature.

Although it’s “Game Over” for now, you can keep yourself entertained with the following resources, as we count down to next year’s launch:

• Chain Reaction RVR-05 page on Nick Trotta's website
• Chain Reaction RVR-05 construction video on YouTube
• Nick Trotta’s Instagram account @galacticplasticslego

READ MORE: Revealed and available to pre-order: 11384 Golden Retriever Puppy from LEGO® Icons 

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