I was customizing a ship and I noticed when I added heavy fighter bays they did not add any power to the ship.
I decided to make a titan with no weapons other than a bunch of heavy fighter bays. The ship's attack value was zero.

I then moved the ship by itself and attacked the Bulrathi player.

I took command of the combat and as suspected the ship did not launch any fighters. It moved through the other fleet taking hits and did nothing. After a min the Bulrathi ships stopped attacking and all ships stopped auto-moving. The game was not locked up however as I was still able to pause and speed up combat. I then backed out of the combat which put me back to the auto-resolve screen.

Auto-resolve combat said I had an excellent chance to win the battle, but when I did the auto-resolve the game seemed to get stuck in an infinite loop of some sort. I was not able to abort the combat and I had to exit the game in the windows task manager.

Also note: It might be possible to exit a combat that is going unfavorably and start the combat over by using the switch to auto-resolve option. When I used this option it put me back to having the option to initiate combat again with the choice of taking control a second time, auto-resolving it or not even attacking. For game integrity I feel this should be changed to where it auto-resolves the combat directly.