It's not much yet but I wanted to post an update...
I've been worldbuilding this setting extensively in the past weeks - writing 4k years of history is tougher than it may sound. I figured out that an entire galaxy is quite too big and that even a whole quarter is much more territory than I'd care to cover. I always realized the Milky Way was big, even before they upped their estimate of its size, but I never really did the math on a setting using all that real estate. It's a bit like a Niven Ringworld: Cool to think about, but when you actually intend to build a detailed setting it's about the dumbest idea ever.
So, I've been revising and I'm going to end up with something that roughly covers the Orion spur, our little retard of a spiral arm.
Speed of communication and travel makes a big difference here. I did not want characters to zip around the universe in days, so I settled on a very moderate 6-7 light years per day, meaning it'll take decades to travel across the galaxy. The mechanics of ftl travel aren't fully worked out yet except that it'll be a kind of jumpdrive.
The map's a very rough draft for now. States do not have names yet. Earth is spinward (left off of the map), and it's lost. A trope, I know, but it allows me to cut away cultural baggage. It also lets me use the old human civilization as the "precursor" race.
I'd also like to mention that the setting is anathema to Star Trek in a way, in that this is very far from an interstellar Utopia (I find that notion terribly naive) and that in my universe "the federation" is a manipulative, authoritarian police state and "the empire" is basically benign.
Sword Worlds are a nod to H. Beam Piper. I recently discovered that his stories are no longer copyrighted and available at Project Gutenberg and Librivox. I must say his early death was a genuine loss for science fiction.
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