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.
Clearly, the NX-01 and NX-02 had a brig and crew quarters. Their photonic torpedoes were anti-matter based, not atomic. Also, visual communication was possible.
The way Spock described it originally made me think of very basic junker ships hurling atomic bombs at each other with only radio transmission and barely able to sustain themselves in deep space.
There are always plausable explanations, which might allow the writers to wriggle out of their canonical straight-jacket. It's pretty late at night here, otherwise I'd take you through each discrepancy. Aside from referring you
Affliction, where Reed is confined to a brig, barely room enough to hold two people... Most crew on the NX-class, were in two bunk quarters. With the increased number of MACOs and who knows, maybe a contingent from an Earth Stellar Navy? That would stretch the crew capacity to the limit.
I'll tackle the important one - that old atomic chestnut. I wouldn't for one moment, pretend anything seen during ENT never happened. Case in point, here in the early 21st Century we can produce electric and hydrogen fueled cars. But they're not exactly common place. Give Enterprise a break and look for realistic explainations why a few of the more 'advanced' aspects of 22nd Century technology regressed during the Earth/Romulan conflict. The NX-01 was just a test bed and desperation meant they had the best prototype weaponary available to take on the Xindi.
Perhaps the Romulan War took place with the use of spatial torpedoes? There's absolutely nothing onscreen that contradicts the notion they're nuclear. (Atomic is such an old fashioned term TOS used). So why the retrograde step back in technology then? Maybe the enemy developed a means of remotely tapping into the photonic variety (through hull plating, inside the ship itself). Releasing the magnetic isolation field, resulting in many casualities from lethal gamma rays. Since a key disaster like that, Earth Starfleet vessels would then have to further develop forcefields or thicker shielding around anything using anti-matter. Then as in reality, wartime brings further advances like the first protective shield bubble metres outside the hull, surpassing the ability of polarized plating.
The next major inconsistancy is a Romulan Empire experimenting with cloaks. Well of course, we don't know stealth devices are exactly the same as 23rd/24th century means of invisibility. It was holography they tested on those drone ships, as I recall. That was basically camouflage able to mimic the appearance of other ships - switching between looking transparent, then like the NX-01 or an Andorian ship and so on. For the majority of the war, I imagine such high-tech wouldn't come into play, not in the traditional hide & seek way TOS/TNG did. More likely the Romulans could employ it tactically to catch an enemy off guard, like projecting fake visual signals of a much larger fleet. So Earth vessels go after what they see as a swarm of vessels but not all are real. Some turn out to be explosive holographic decoys, effective making ship-to-ship confrontation as ferocious as Styles described in
Balance of Terror. From our perspective, the Romulan vessels appear to finish a suicide run... when few ships would even have an occupant. Maybe one or two controlling the whole fleet, necessary to remotely operate the surrounding ships... who are obviously too busy coordinating the attack to communicate visually.
So history books record that no bodies were ever recovered or face-to-face meeting. Of course, they don't. United Earth Goverment wouldn't risk releasing such information anyway. A Vulcanoid race out to conquer Earth, possibly double-dealing with other Coalition members? Yeah, Terra Prime would go into recruitment overdrive with that, especially on a planet feeling increasingly victimised.
(New uniforms with the delta shield are introduced).
