A:Is Terran/Confed/Human space completely enclosed by other empires, or is there a 'frontier' region that is full of uncharted or mostly uncharted systems? If so, what human organizations deal with this frontier? Is the Confed military the driving force behind charting new systems, or is there some kind of scouting agency?
Human space, or more accurately, the human controlled portion of the jump network does have a frontier. Exploration continues in a coreward direction. Anti-spinward of the humans are the Rlaan, who also have a large coreward frontier. Spinward of human space, the jump network appears to thin out and become increasingly sparse, and the search for new jump points has been greatly scaled back over the years as results have diminished. In the Confederation, the Exploration Service, a civilian overseen, though militarily staffed, branch of the government is responsible for charting new systems and searching for undiscovered jump points.
The Aera, in contrast to the Humans and Rlaan, have no rich avenues for continued expansion. While they do find the occasional new jump point in their own territory, all evidence points towards their having no significant potential for peaceful expansion of their borders. This boxing in by the other species is the primary motivator for the Aera entering into their recent conflicts.
Q:
A:What is the feeling about the confed-Aera war in the Confederacy owned systems (or just generally, the whole of human space)? More specifically, is there a pattern in the political feelings of the majority in relation to position in space (ie, people on the aeran border more for the war, people near earth indifferent?).
While there are pacifists and xenophobes with their own fringe reasons for hating or loving the war, the majority of humans consider themselves more pragmatic, and can be roughly split into the "appeasement" and "containment" camps. The bulk of the adherents of an appeasement philosophy predicate their displeasure with the war on the assumption that the Confederation is likely to lose the war, and should thus have avoided it at all costs. The advocates of containment tend to assert that anything short of crippling the Aera will eventually come back to haunt humanity.
Outside the Confederation, the worlds of the Forsaken are firmly pro-war, which is unsurprising, considering that the Aera began the war by invading Forsaken star systems. In the Confederation, the containment camp is much larger than the appeasment camp, due to the Aera having invaded human space. Even in worlds far removed from the conflict, the propaganda machine's not entirely untruthful portrayal of the Aera as ruthless and unscrupulous in pursuit of victory has caused sufficient discomfort to motivate even those only abstractly hurt by the war to tend to support the war efforts.
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My apologies, but I'm running a little short on time tonight, so I'll save the remaining questions for later.