There is indeed a situational improvement: in previous games you could only jump to gates or beacons. If where you want to go is a situation involving one of your ships/stations you can teleport there and are immediately involved in the action.Mick Maidens wrote:Why is jumping from ship to ship with a teleporter an improvement over the jump drive?
The disadvantage is that it requires more time to set up: your freighters would ideally have a combat ship escort (to which you can teleport to defend said freighter). Jumping to a sector/zone requires that you sent a NPC controlled ship there first.
But after having seeded all relevant zones with suitable ships you can teleport to, it is better for the player since no beacon/jump gate requirement (jumping can eventually be simulated by positioning a set of your favorite ships at each gate or anywhere else for that matter). The only remaining 'disadvantage' is that you can't take cargo with you, which is only relevant for trading. But if trading is balanced to accommodate more local economies that is a non-issue as the only thing that changes are the distance considerations, distance between target station and nearest gate/beacon changes to actual distance between source and destination in the universe.