Nota Bene - These questions are answered here because they have come up on the Fiction List as part of an ongoing conversation aiming to flesh out and rationalize Accord's, Avenger's and Shadowstar's specific branches of Trek. It is, however, very important to remember Accord's earliest editorial rule:
What this means is that your story should be concentrating on people: how they think, what they think, why they think that way, how they react to given situations, how they solve problems, how they interact. It should not be concentrating on the latest way to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.
This being Trek, the obvious answer would be, 'however long the story calls for' :-).
Less flippantly, these questions have not really been answered fully. However, it would be reasonable to suppose that one of the points of having star bases scattered hither and yon is to minimize communication lag.
To demonstrate the difficulty in answering the question more reasonably, let's take a look at some specifics. For the sake of argument, let's assume that 'maximum warp' is Old Scale Warp Nine (although Accord can probably go faster if she has to) and that subspace communication travels significantly faster than that, let's say Old Scale Warp Fifteen. The former is based on capabilities of similar ships both televised and fan-produced; the latter is pulled out of your humble FAQ-keeper's hat.
The old Warp scale basically took the Warp Factor and cubed it to obtain the approximate multiple of the speed of light achieved. Some fannish formulae then add an additional calculation to this in the belief (probably correct) that the numbers come out too 'slow' for what we see on screen otherwise. For the moment, we'll assume Old Scale Warp Nine is 729c, and OS Warp Fifteen would be 3375c, among other things to prove why such additional calculations are clearly necessary :-). We will also assume that normal cruising speed is OS Warp Seven, or 343c.
This means that Accord could, theoretically, travel 729 light years in one year, which translates rather neatly to almost exactly two light years per day, and can normally cruise at a little under one light-year per day. Which seems nice and fast, until you remember that the nearest star to Earth is four light years away - two days at Warp Nine, four at Warp Seven. Travel times in televised Trek clearly take far less time than this.
So, we can either come up with an arbitrary answer and later fit our calculations to it, or see if we can come up with a calculation we like and then fit our answer to it. Neither has yet been seriously attempted. For the moment, however, assume that Accord is never lagged by more than an hour or so, and can race back to Last Chance within a few days if she's at the furthest extent of her range (to which she hasn't been, yet).
This question is even more problematical, because it depends on questions of astrocartography that have never been canonically answered (namely, how large the Federation is at that time, how large the Klingon Empire is at that time, and what the dimensions of their borders are).
Accord's bridge is based on the bridge from The Undiscovered Country, with two major modifications. The first is that there is a standing station on the rail directly aft of the Captain's Chair, similar in position to the Tactical station on the Enterprise-D. This was originally intended as a station for the Executive Officer, but with the changeover from Shappe to the much shorter Kinne, this was simply not workable; Kinne now typically sits at one of the Mission Ops stations when not in the centre seat. Before Cohen became Operations Officer, this left the station mostly unused, because everyone else already had a bridge station (Smith was Senior Helmsman). Cohen, having no other bridge duties than Ops, uses this console now when he's on the bridge.
The second modification is, as it happens, directly aft of that. Fandom has long assumed that the restrooms, a lounge, and possibly the CO's office lurked behind the bridge on the same deck, accessed by rotating the turbolift. Captain Anbinder declared that concept 'silly', so Accord instead has a door between the two turbolifts, rather than a station, and this door leads to the head, a small lounge/lobby area, and the Captain's Ready Room.
There was a tremendous debate on this question on the Fiction List, a debate made cloudier by the fact that televised and novelised Trek are extraordinarily inconsistent on this point. In the end, a decision was made to ignore these inconsistencies and concentrate on what seems to make sense.
It is the general (but by no means unanimous) feeling of the group that it is virtually impossible to conduct any meaningful battle run by mere human beings and reliant on mechanical moving parts (like phaser banks) at faster-than-light speeds. It doesn't matter that the computers can process FTL data (and it is assumed that they can - otherwise, navigation while under Warp Drive would be problematic, at best); human beings cannot, and everything we've seen is that human beings, not computers, run the battle (except on Eminiar VII and Vendikar, of course). Even if human beings could, the phaser and megaphaser emplacments all involve mechanical moving parts to swivel to aim and track a target, and they're not going to be able to do that at even a significant fraction of the Speed of Light, let alone FTL. All the target ship would have to do is alter their course a tiny fraction and, at those speeds, you would miss by miles!
So, it is assumed that battles must take place in real space, at relatively small fractions of light, and therefore that battles tend to range over a relatively small area.