Time is always a governing factor. There is literally no mission profile where taking twenty seconds to deploy an away team and another twenty to recover them, rather than twenty minutes, does not come up. There are precious few where it's not strictly superior.
It is, and that's really handy, but the point I was making is somewhat different, apologies if I was speaking unclearly. What I mean is that in a lot of mission types, the constraint that governs the overall duration of the mission is likely to be something else. If the ship is escorting a freighter, or taking some sensor readings at different points in an atmosphere to work out why a planet's ozone layer has been depleted in fifty years rather than five hundred thousand like models suggested, or helping build a geological monitoring station, etc... There are going to be other constraints or pinch-points in the schedule which still determine mission duration even if the crew could instantaneously be transported everywhere.
It's like, I don't know if you've ever played one of those games like
Factorio, where the speed in a production line is essentially set by the slowest part of the production line? (I haven't, but it's the best analogy I can think of.) It doesn't matter if your widget-spinner is instantaneous, if your flumbit-plunger still takes thirty seconds. That kind of thing.
So the Biological Transporter is definitely nice to have, and undoubtedly improves general efficiency in a bunch of ways, and is great for emergencies or certain other kinds of emergency-adjacent scenarios, though. But it does not necessarily directly boost the amount of work the ship can do in a year in the same sense as higher warp cruising speeds, because transport time for away teams is not typically the
governing time constraint for mission duration.
There's a cool use case of transporters (not even bio rated), and it's postal drops. Just fly by and beam down your package. You save on a lot of docking or landing procedures, which I think is neat if you have a lot of packages.
And considering this is our fastest cargo rated ship, I think it could be kinda relevant.
We do have transporters either way, I should add, they'll just be the standard ones where you don't use them for people except in emergencies, and sometimes cause transporter-induced injuries if you try. But for cargo and stuff, they're normally fine.
There's also a special ops use case. I don't think it would be too hard to use this ship to deliver commandos to groundside pirate bases for example. Or resupply stranded ground forces. And the transporter makes that much less risky than shuttles.
Honestly using transporters for commando stuff never comes up enough in
Star Trek and it should. Probably a budget thing, but can you imagine how cool using a transporter to teleport people in for a HALO jump would look? Or dropping them at really low altitude under enemy sensors, then having them wingsuit through a canyon and base jump.
