Hmm... a lengthened and very slim nose may stretch out the duration of the initial boom, but not by very much in real terms - the nose on the aircraft in the headline pic looks to be ~10m, so if the a/c is flying at 940 mph...
940 mph = 420.2 m/s, so with a nose length of 10m, the initial boom could potentially be stretched to 10m / 420.2 m/s = 0.02349 seconds = 1/42th of a second.
However, I don't think it will be possible to design a nose that will work at different supersonic speeds - it'll have to be designed for one speed only, and the a/c will have to stick to that speed pretty closely.
I can't see anything that they may do to the rest of the airframe making much difference to the boom because the 'boom' comes from the two ends of the a/c - the nose and tail. The main purpose of the canards in the design shown in the headline pic will be to generate vortices over the wing to reduce take-off and landing speeds; the ogi wing in Concorde effectively gave it very long leading edge extensions, which did the same thing, but the TU 144, which had a very similar planiform to the a/c in the pic, had to use canards too.
No idea why they need that little wing on the tip of the fin though - maybe artistic license - won't be surprised if it's omitted on the actual a/c.
The only certain way to reduce the loudness of sonic booms is to move their source further away = fly higher. Ok for cruise, but still noisy while climbing and gaining speed.
Never heard Concorde supersonic but by crikey, those military spec engines, derived from the TSR-2 project, were bloody loud - I attended quite a few IT (it was DP back then, of course) training courses at a certain establishment in Windsor and when a Concorde was climbing out to the West, and passed over at ~2k ft, trying to talk and be heard was impossible - if the trainer was talking they'd simply have to stop for about ten seconds or so, but everyone got used to it pretty quickly.
But despite the shattering noise, it was still a beautifully elegant thing to see.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
