Just what the title says. I'm curious if it's actually possible.
I've been away from Giga for a while, in large part because although I like many things it adds, I always disliked how the big end-game crises were solved by building a System Craft and it never seemed like you were expected to do much else. If anything, just because that meant you were locked into a fairly demanding collection of Ascension Perks that cut you off from doing anything other than working towards a System Craft (and I'm thankful to see that was consolidated a little).
I've had a look at the Aeternum, and beating them without rocket planets seems... feasible. Like I gave it a go, and it depended on luck, but as you fight Aeternum fleets you gradually start doing more damage to them, so you can gradually build up a running buff enough that normal ships armed with torpedoes can tangle with Planet Craft, and you can win on a principle of sheer volume. I still buckled in the end due to attrition costs, but it felt attainable. You know, like if I were playing a stronger origin or really abusing certain mechanics, it was in the realm of possibility.
Part of this is owed to being able to delay the Aeternum and also slowing their craft enough that I can choose the fights I get into early on - though if you're in their direct line of attack and they dump their first several planets on you right when they wake up, it's not happening.
Blokkats just appear to not be a possibility, though. One aspect of the problem is that we now have Cetana, so you can't delay defeating the crisis since she will unceremoniously cntrl-a delete the galaxy via an event command if you don't kill her off when you're instructed to (which was cool once but now I wish I could turn her off). Killing her then triggers the Blokkat spawn. The second issue is that Awakened Empires tend to wipe out the crises now if you don't make the effort on your own, so any other crisis is liable to die when the galaxy's vengeful grandpa gets off his porch (in fact this is part of why I thought I'd grab Giga again, to get crises the Awakened Empires don't defeat independently). So you're dealing with the Blokkats soon after the first crisis arrives regardless of what you'd like.
On the default setting for Giga Experience, you're limited to one planetcraft, and I think mine died of fear before the fighting actually began with the Blokkats. Probably the first alpha strike wiped out its hull instantly, since it was the largest thing in the system. That was just fighting the little expeditionary forces, mind you. A fleet going to fight a Dismantler vanishes into dust before the game can actually draw the graphics for the Dismantler.
I'm well aware of the game settings and the mechanics for the mod, so I'm not asking for help on how to turn the Blokkats off or lower their difficulty or whatever. I'm really just curious - has anyone beaten these things in 4.3 with the default "Giga Experience" settings without using other mods? I can respect if "Blokkats kill you, there's nothing you can do, sorry" is the intended "Giga Experience", but there are people who build Dorf Fortresses in Hell, in spite of that not really being intended as possible, so who knows.