The Machynlleth Loop, better known as the Mach Loop, is a network of valleys located in North Wales and is used by the Royal Air Force, United States Air Force, and various other visiting air forces for low level flight training. It is famous for it’s incredible sights of fast moving jets, heavy cargo planes, and on the rare occasions the odd massive air to air tanker or helicopters. Popular with plane spotters it offers an incredible experience of seeing military aircraft flying as low as 250ft which from the right vantage point often lets you look down at the passing aircraft.
The Mach Loop is located in North Wales on a stretch of the A487 between the towns of Machynlleth (where it derives it’s name from) and Dolgellau.
Whilst the Mach Loop is roughly just 20km x 20km a map containing it could be extended to the surrounding area to fit the size of the rest of the maps in-game such as:
64km x 64km (Size of most standard top tier maps)
This would include a lot more valleys, hills, mountains, and a body of water whilst also having some flat terrain suitable to place airfields. Bombing targets could be placed within the valleys requiring players to either navigate the terrain or fly high.
128km x 128km (Size of Enduring Confrontation maps)
This would be a much bigger area covering the vast majority of Mid-North Wales and further expand on the features that the previous size would by also including another RAF training area, RAF Valley located further north based on the Isle of Anglesey. It would give plenty more opportunities to add various targets and threats and much more room to play with.
256km x 256km (Size of Tropical Coast, the new largest map in-game used in Nuclear Escalation)
This would include the entirety of Wales along with a big chunk of Mid-West England and chunk of the Irish Sea. This once again would expand on the area of the last iterations however instead could be renamed to LFA (Low Flying Area) 7 as this contains that entire area. This would give plenty of room to populate with airfields, bombing/strike targets, naval assets, or potentially even AI air targets such as AWACS aircraft or air to air tankers.
As you make the map larger to fit the games standard you do start to lose sight of what the map is based around so separate names might be in order to fit them better but I believe it could make for a good map to be added to the game. It would be somewhat similar in play to the EC version of the Afghanistan map but the actual play area would be filled with more obstacles and varied terrain giving more of a challenge and opportunities to use the terrain to your advantage.
- Yes
- No
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- 64km x 64km
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- 128km x 128km
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- 256km x 256km
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- I said no