hi Mark;
I have a full course online that you might be interested in. It goes through pretty much everything you need to know about rigging vehicles so you should be able to cross-use that information with the ship. I don’t go particularly indepth about matrixes like I’ve used in this thread but I’m fairly confident you should be able to create your own with the same information. Udemy are always holding sales but I can give a Coupon code if it’s easier (you shouldn’t need to pay more than £15.)
I was wondering whether it would’ve been worth creating a course specifically on this ship because it utilises tons of different tools within Blender.
As for the matrix itself; it interacts with other elements in an overall armature rig but I guess I could talk basically about how it works, design choices, that kind of thing if that’s what you’re interested in?