Remember that mod I sent you? Tried to deploy a Kitty Hawk carrier and an ASF-4 Fighter Wing. Instant crash upon hitting the Deploy button. I was using the ISS Black Star from the first vanilla mission. This happens with any other ship I try, and doesn't require the Kitty Hawk to crash; seems to be linked to the mod's fighters.
Now that I think about it, it might be linked to the Afterburner AI mod.
EDIT: Tried removing Afterburner ship system on the ASF-4. Still instant crash.
A note to yourself, and for that matter, a lot of end-users interested in installing mods for Starsector:
Unless the author him/her/themselves explicitly declare otherwise, presume that all mods that haven't been updated since October 20th of this year, to NOT work with v0.65a or newer.
Too many things were changed around in the core code to expect anything more than successfully loading the game, and little more than that.
The mod that you are trying to run, the Patrian Principate, hasn't been updated once since it's initial release in late October/early November of 2013.
So... odds are, random crashes are almost guaranteed, even if only trying to load the non-campaign missions.