I see your point, Paul (may I safely assume it's not your code that's writing me? :-), but what I meant is that I need to reset the ship's rotation on two axis only. In this case, I need to reset the ship's x and y, since I'm once again working on the x/y plane and all I want is for the ship to level (as opposed to leveling and facing in a different direction relative to the plane).
Which brings me to a suggestion, Egon: since you already implemented the config.oldStyle3DS boolean, why not change the new style loader to rotate all the models into jpct's x/z plane? And everyone who, like me, has worked with the x/y will just set the boolean to true whereas everyone else will no longer have to worry about this issue.