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Star Trek : Enterprise takes place over a hundred years before the "Original Series" (with Kirk and the crew) but we have a problem here.
The spaceship in the series TOS is very spartan, where they have almost no displays and panels at all whereas on the NX-01 spaceship they have huge view-panels, monitors and the font is smaller on the monitors.
Why does it look more modern inside the NX-01 than the USS Enterprise NCC-1701?
There is no canonical answer to this, as it's not a problem of canon; it's a problem of out-of-universe (real-life) issues such as budget, imagination and special effects. For example, according to producers Robert Justman and Herb Solow (Inside Star Trek), the show's budget was "so tiny", they couldn't afford to have costumes made by union costume-makers — instead, they had them made overnight by a "sweatshop," and sneaked the finished costumes in through a back window at the studio. For its time it was not an inexpensive series, but comparatively, series that aired in the late 60's (Westerns, modern dramas, or sitcoms) relied on a well-established stock of costumes and props; everything in Star Trek had to be created pretty much from scratch. Star Trek needed a higher budget than most other series airing at that time. TNG came along after the success of Star Wars, which changed studio attitudes towards sci-fi. Enterprise benefited from the relative success of TNG.
The budget of Star trek averaged about $180,000 per episode. At around the same time, there was Irwin Allen's Land of the Giants (1968–1970), a sci-fi adventure wherein a sub-orbital transport spaceship encounters a strange space storm and is transported to a mysterious planet where everything is twelve times larger than its counterpart on Earth. It's budget was $250,000. Compare to $140,000 per episode for Lost in Space (1965–1968) a show not exactly well known for mind-blowing set or special effects. These are just the realities of real-life limitations on the quality of sets.
For another out-of-universe example, why did all the women wear velvet mini-dresses in TOS? Is this consistent with uniform evolution seen in Enterprise -> TOS -> TNG?
There is one major event that happens between Enterprise and The Original Series that has not been directly depicted onscreen: The Earth-Romulan War. What little official canon we know about the nature of this war comes from Spock's remarks during TOS:
As you recall from your histories, this conflict was fought, by our standards today, with primitive atomic weapons and in primitive space vessels which allowed no quarter, no captives. Nor was there even ship-to-ship, visual communication; therefore, no human, Romulan, or ally has ever seen the other. Earth believes the Romulans to be warlike, cruel, treacherous... and only the Romulans know what they think of Earth.
Photonic torpedoes (not photon torpedoes) were introduced at the end of Enterprise Season 2, so initially it would appear that this description is pretty far off. However, Memory Alpha does note that the type explosive used in spatial torpedoes has not been specified, and they were seen in the Enterprise's armory in the final season when conflicts with the Romulans were beginning. If they were classified as atomic, then Spock's comment could be seen as a simplified history. The same might be said of the rest of it, as well.
The lack of ship-to-ship visual communication seems to be a direct contradiction to what was shown on Enterprise, given that it was standard throughout the series, unless something happened that caused Starfleet to temporarily give up on such communication channels.
While non-canon, the novels did introduce some Romulan technology that could explain this.
Near the end of Enterprise, in the three-parters 4x12 through 4x14 (Babel One, United, and The Aenar), we learn the Romulans are experimenting with telepresence-controlled ships, using Aenar as their test subjects.
The summary of the ENT novel Kobayashi Maru, which takes place after the end of the TV series, indicates the Romulans have a new technology based on telepresence, called telecapture. They'd successfully used it to hack in and take over Klingon and Vulcan ships, and planned to use it on the Enterprise as well.
Two simple ways to defend against such technology immediately come to mind:
So Spock's description of the Earth-Romulan war may have been literally correct, not because of a lack of technology, but rather as a defence against a new weapon. Post-war, when little was still known about the Romulans, the mechanical controls seen in TOS could have been maintained to avoid risking the telecapture technology being used again.
The answer to this comes down to exactly one factor and one factor alone: Size.
The NX Class Enterprise was the first of its kind - a Warp 5 Capable Starship. It was packed with as much of the fledgling Earth Starfleet's technology as it could get. And it was 225 meters long, 135.8 meters wide, and 33.3 meters tall. - Memory Alpha
Compare this to the NCC-1701, which had comparable width, but was over 300 meters long and over 70 meters tall. (Note: It was difficult to find specs for the NCC-1701, and I assume that "Beam" is comprable to width here, which could be wrong)
Because the NX-01 was much more compact, we see a lot more of the onboard navigation and technical equipment packed into one place (like our present-day spaceships/stations would be). But on the NCC-1701, that's no longer an issue. It's a much larger ship, and allows for a much more comfortable, lived-in aesthetic.
In short, the reason the NX looks so much more 'advanced' is precisely because more of its tech has to be visible in a smaller space in order for the crew to interact with it.
