If you look very closely, there *is* a harness.
Wolfie is daring, no doubt, but he’s not suicidal.

As long as we’re doing a complete reimagining of the LZ facilities, consider this pipe dream:
Digging out the very top of the parking lot to inset the existing storage containers.
Some reinforced concrete on top, then some dirt and/or grass.
This would add area to the East approach, making it wider.
This would open up all the area where the containers currently are for parking.
And that parking would be gravitationally advantageous.
Having a wider area would make it easier to have multiple rows of cars.
Yes, we get an extra row in now, but it’s pretty tight.
Storage would be much closer to the LZ, too.

Because someone has to be responsible and retract them.

We can’t keep the freaking door locked overnight on the container.

I’m there quite a bit, but I’m not always the last one there.

Rather than minimum cost right now, we should be thinking maximum utility over the next 25 to 50 years

I think spending money on a professionally engineered solution now is going to be cheaper in the long run.

I’m pretty sure we had fewer than 100 members when the former structure got built.  Granted, it came together a little higgledy-piggledy, and at relatively low cost to the club, because IIRC a large portion of the materials were donated by members.   Pretty much all the labor was.  If we had built the bottom of the columns in a way that didn’t let them deteriorate due to moisture, we might still have it.

But now we have 200+ members, and multiple instructors.  Even if most of the students don’t hang around and become regular users, they’re still wanting shade in between kiting while they’re students.

Maybe the plan should plan on taking the building in stages, but in a modular and expandable way.

I like the hip roofs.  No matter which way the wind comes it’s at a negative AoA.  Well, zero, I suppose, overall, but you know what I mean.

That suggests an idea to me:   a vented hip.  Viewed from the side, in ascii art it would look something like:  / —– \ , although I expect the slashes would be at much lower angles, and there would be more overlap with the hyphens.

I’m not sure how you’d calculate what the optimum opening at the top is.  You’d want the air displaced by one side to “shade” the positive AoA of the other.

On the other hand, a flat roof would probably work, because it did, until it got structurally compromised by rot.

Jai Paul is an architect, and has kindly volunteered to supervise the design.  He says he’ll design to code, upgraded to 130 mph wind, which is comfortably above anything I’ve ever seen out there.

I’ll trust calculation over “that looks about right.”

I was out looking at the remains, and I think what happened was that the wood on the columns deteriorated due to moisture.  So a load that it might have taken ten years ago just separated the wood.  The bolts holding the bottom end are still in the metal brackets.

I’m not opposed to a structural ‘fuse’, so that things break at expected points, but in general, I think I’d rather just make sure it stays together.

We have quite a variety of skills in the club, and I doubt I’m the most qualified to design a new building.

I’ve looked at prefabbed steel buildings in the past, but they’re pretty pricey.  How that compares with the time/money we’d spend designing/fabricating our own I dunno. They’re generally designed like pole barns, which wouldn’t be bad, giving a large clear span, but they have many posts along each side.  That’s not so bad  for a barn, or on the windward side, where I want to put a wall anyway, but on the east side I’d like a big free span as well.

If we could get a prefab roof and put it on some big trusses spanning the length of the concrete with only a few support columns,  that might be good.

Google “steel carports” to see the kind of thing I was looking at.

Looking at what’s gone, though, if there was a solid wall between the two sets of steps, and we didn’t replace the south sink (since there’s still a sink in the kitchen area), the unobstructed shade area at each end of the container could be much bigger.