Hey Kuxy, I'm playing around with the default chest in outpost mode, and I've been doing some researches and moving chests around to see what the result is, and I think either the Research text or the Chest.lua configuration is incorrect.

The text of the "Expand Sector" research states that it will increase the sector size by 0.5 chunks in each direction, which should be 16 tiles in each direction. But as Chest.lua reveals on line 90 the behavior is actually completely different. Each of the three researches adds a different amount of space, making the sector 4, 8, or 12 tiles wider in total. Each side actually only gets half that, so for the first research you only get 1/8th of what it says, and even the last is only 3/8ths as much as the tooltip.

This seems pretty harsh at the moment. Regardless of whether or not that gets a buff though, I think the mouseover text of the research on line 65 of prototypes.cfg needs to be updated to help describe how big a sector actually is, which might help with people sometimes being confused in the discussions about how big a sector really is since nowhere in-game seems to report it.

In my own game, I think I'll go ahead and set each value to 32 instead of 4, 8, and 12, because then it matches what the text suggests, and which I was planning around.

Edit: On further analysis, I think that the way the researches are set up the current values are intentional, and it's the localization/description which isn't very helpful. Since each of the three researches is independently infinite, you can technically research ten thousand of each one if you want, so it makes sense that they're relatively very small. It'd help if each one specified what the intended result is, though.

Since I don't think the Smart Linked Chests mod has a GitHub, forgive me for rambling on here. I think my suggestion for clarifying this would be to convert the first two researches to non-infinite, with a cap of say 5 levels each, but make each one stronger. Changing runtime/Chests.lua line 90 as follows:
sectorSize = sectorSize + (tech_level_a*32 + tech_level_b*32 +tech_level_c*32)

And prototypes\technology.lua line 51 as follows:
max_level = (name == a) and 5 or (name == b) and 5 or (name == c) and "infinite",

With the first 5 researches being 16 times more powerful, the second 5 being 8 times more powerful, and the infinite researches being approximately 5 times more powerful, it may also be appropriate to increase the count variables defined on lines 42-44 of technology.lua. I think in my game I'll set them to 200, 400, and 1000 or so. More expensive, but not to the same extent as the result is more powerful, because as it was they felt rather tediously underpowered. Being able to expand a sector size from 2-4.5 sectors with cheap research is nice, but like this I think it scales reasonably enough that you might still be inclined to use them even in a game which has surface linked chests enabled.

The only real downside that comes to mind is if somebody deliberately wanted a smaller sector chest, so that they could have non-overlapping factories for some reason? An interesting thought, but I think that's about all I've got on the topic for now. Thanks for the cool mod Kuxy.