id just create a camera, probibly without attatching it to the ship. use the ships radius or bounding box to guestimate how big it is (and how far behind it to place the camera), and compute an offset above and behind the ship, far enough back to see the word more than the ship but not so far you cant see the model. now airquake kinda used an orbital type camera so you will need need to come up with an orientation matrix that represents this rotation and unrotate the offset by it (i think). you would probibly use mouse deltas to come up with a fresh matrix and multiply your current view matrix by it every frame. this should pivot the viewpoint vector around the ship. you will then most likely have to add the ships world position to that. this gets the camera world position, now you need to figure out its orientation. you will want to look in the general direction of the ship, but not directly at it. if you want things to be exactly like airquake where the cameras roll was always level to the horizon, you could simply subtract the ship position from the camera position, zero out the y component and then create an orientation from the vector and set the camera to it. this is probibly not 100% correct, id have to actually implement it to check the math.
