I believe the freeze is related to either Casta’s enemy AI researching modded technologies or interactions with jammer radars.
The freeze happens at the exact same game time every time.
I tested disabling only normal radars (since jammer radars are needed to even play Casta), disabling radar scanning, and manually removing visible radars — the freeze still happened.
However, when using a command to delete all radars, including jammer radars, the freezing stopped.
Fully removing the Casta mod also fixes the problem permanently.
This happened hours after finishing Casta and moving to a different planet, which made it pretty frustrating — if it had happened early on, I would have just removed the mod straight away.
Right now, the only fix I can think of is disabling Casta’s enemy AI entirely, removing all jammer radars and modding myself in another way to get battlefield data — but that kind of removes the whole point of the mod.