Animals panic when they hear the boom: they tend to stampede, fall off cliffs, break legs, trample each other, lambs get separated, break through hedges and into traffic.
The booms were severe enough to occassionally shatter the Royal Doulton in the house, much to my mother's disgust.
Whilst this was political to some extent the politics were very much local, as in people don’t want to hear booms.
I’d be pisses if jets flying overheard broke my windows once every five years.
Expanding that to all supersonic military aircraft and the Rockwell B-1 Lancer has a higher maximum takeoff weight than the concord. It’s a loud and heavy beast.
So I suppose an artillery shell, a jet fighter, and a Concorde should produce about the same amount of boom at the same speed of, say, 1.5 M, while flying by.
The engine sound of the aircraft, though, can add significantly to the noise in the wake of the boom cone. Those engines are not low-power or quiet.
You need both pressure level (voltage) and momentum (current) in order to stay strong over distances (shock waves diffuse over time) to break windows. Small, super fast things create large pressure differentials, big jets create more momentum.
This does cause some stability or handling issues for the aircraft.
The analogy re: voltage or amperage are spurious and just don’t apply here.
The shockwave generated by a body shaped like an acute cone is a (somewhat less acute) cone with the same apex. Inside the shock wave, the air gradually turns around to move parallel to the body, like so [0]. Each streamline that enters the shock structure keeps turning around, so each bit of air keeps feeling a force even after it passes through the original cone-shaped shock. In the case of a cone-shaped body, the interaction happens to create a single "straight" wave, but it's still generated by the entire surface of the cone, not just the sharp point of it.
As a rule of thumb, the magnitude of the sonic boom is proportional to the weight of the plane. That is because most of the interaction between the plane and the air is from the wing, it needs to continuously deflect down enough air to generate a lifting force. So the total boom has one contribution from the cross-section of the fuselage, and another from the wings, and the latter is determined by the weight.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Benay/publicati...
They are wildly, fundamentally different in behavior.
You’ll notice that supersonic aircraft have different airfoil shapes, different airframe shapes, and wildly different engine configurations because they don’t work the same way.
There is of course air behind the Mach cone, but it is much lower pressure, will often completely separate (airflow wise) from the airfoil shape in ways you would not expect, and the shockwaves/speed of propagation can cause bizarre pressure, lift, and drag issues. You can end up with massive vacuum where you previously had pressure, or pressure where you preciously had vacuum. Transonic flight or high angle of attack flight at supersonic speeds of course produces rapidly changing variations of all these effects.
[https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/8.1394?journalCode=jans]
Unlike subsonic flight, the air can’t “get out of the way” in time, leading to potentially catastrophic issues without careful design. Supersonic flight is better categorized as ‘shoving through slow air’ than flight.
What you’re referring to is not wrong - just doesn’t reflect the magnitude of the actual differences
There was also a political part involved. The Concorde was a British-French creation, not a Boeing. Had there been a Boeing supersonic passenger plane first there would probably have been different FAA rules. Especially because military supersonic flight happens every day over US land, was never banned, and causes the same boom.