Sundog
I saw the numbers for this design when I was back in school in the eighties, it's design was fine just as it is. It turns out Lockheed actually knows what it's doing when it comes to designing aircraft.
What was the L/D ratio anyway at supersonic speed anyway? Over 8.0 to 1?
Of course, I know Lockheed is an excellent aircraft designer. They have made mistakes in the past though and are not perfect.
The twisting on the wing (L2000) isn't about "disproportinate lift" it's about minimizing cruise drag. Granted, that includes minimizing trim drag as well, but it's also about keeping the flow laminar as much as possible in a conical flow field; which isn't necessarily better at low speeds, especially considering it's an off-design point.
Well, as a rule of thumb, to minimize trim-drag aerodynamically
(which Lockheed preferred) the wing has to either just naturally have a very low shift in the center of pressure, such as a highly-swept wing
(or a swing-wing with it's wings all the way back), or the wing has to have means to produce extra lift up front to compensate
(ie. a canard, or design the wing in such that it would produce lift at the forward most area of the wing in large amounts whilst supersonic ideally so at cruise the trim-drag levels are low enough to keep the elevon deflections minimum or flush -- a chine/strake as on the exemplifies this).
Laminar flow if possible is an excellent way to reduce drag overall, though, and I suppose the flow being less turbulent would improve the effects of the control-surfaces, requiring lower deflections for the same results.
Skybolt
During the '70s the focus of SST designs migrated from L/D to emissions and noise (both low speed and boom). And since then things have only become more focused on those.
Truthfully, even during the SST program
(1963-1971) effort was made to reduce sonic boom
(they just weren't very good at it), but I'd have to say that modern supersonic-airliner designs do seem to be far
more focused on pollution, sonic-boom, and noise reduction, than L/D ratio.
And while I understand the need to reduce NOx emission, and I could understand the desire to reduce noise over the SST-design and the Concorde levels,
(although I think current FAA regs are a bit over the top) but the plane's gotta fly good first!
Kendra Lesnick