Freight Ships, unlike forts, can not be penetrated by any zombie, without the help of someone on-boar. This means that they would be a perfect option to hold up in as no barricading or reinforcing of gates is required to protect you from the Zeds.

Note: The main idea of this article is to be as self sufficient as possible.

Food is a necessity of life; no one disagrees with that, but on a ship far from land food requires a lot more effort.

Farming would cover all the greens to prevent scurvy and maintain a healthy life, but water and soil would be an issue. Soil would have to be taken from land onto the boat, and waste would have to be desalinated beforehand, as the plants will not accept salt water. Some plants could also be used to make materials such as oats for thatching roofs or beds.

Chicken coups could be set up easily with recycled fences. This would provide eggs for the ship and the amount provided over the years would simply multiply. If the amount of chickens grew too large the excess chickens could be used for meat products.

Cows could provide milk for the boat but would require more attention and skill to care for.

Fishing would be a great way to provide food for you colony as fish would be an endless supply of food for your colony. There would be two main options:

1. Angle fishing - Platforms would have to be lowered down to allow this method to be effective. This would also mean that a form of bait would be needed, not to mention the basic fact that fishing rods would bee necessary to do so. This method would sustain a small colony of people if the catch was good but would not be the best solution for larger colonies.

2. Net Fishing - This method would be a lot more difficult to complete, but would be more fruitful than angle fishing. The reason it would be so difficult to complete is the fact that smaller boats would have to be deployed with fishing nets. This may prove very problematic as the boats would need to be lifted to and from the water by crane, meaning that storage for the boats would be needed.

The advantage of a tanker or freight ship is that the bowels of the ship can be used as either storage (i.e. food, weapons, ammo, building materials,etc) or a place to build homes for your crew and colony, and with the great amount of space in a freight ships hull this can be done as to support hundreds or even thousands of people. Sure, there would be cabins to house the normal crew of a ship, but this would only support between ten or twenty people, and with the amount of space on a cargo ship that's just a plain waste.

One method is to use the cargo containers (presumably already aboard the ship at the time), and turn these into block like apartments on the ship which could easily house a family of four. All that would be required to do this is to clean out the box of its contents and install a bed, and possibly lights, if needed. Then stack these containers on top of each other, and add a system of ladders to allow access.

The problem with this idea is that a crane would be needed to move the containers, and with more people living aboard the ship the more food would be needed and this would mean that more food would be required to sustain the ships population. This is where the idea of using the ships hull to provide the colony with housing comes in. if the whole thing was done in the hull that would mean more space would be available to farm, meaning that more people could live properly on the boat, and the more people on the boat means the boat will operate more efficiently.

The tanker would successfully be able to hold off almost anything ranging from pirates to Zeds (that is if they could even get there to begin with), with just the sheer size of its hull. The only thing that could possibly be a threat to the ship is if raiders or pirates came bearing arms with a large enough caliber to put a decent hole in the ship. Even so this could be solved by simply chucking some Napalm Bombs into the boat. The reason to use napalm is because it would be nearly impossible to stop if the boat was made of wood, and if it was made of metal, the alternative would be to use small arms fire on the attacking boats personnel from the safety of the ship. If this failed and the raiders somehow gained access to the ship, all unarmed colonists would be sealed in the ships hull while leaving the ships guards to deal with the raiders.

Electricity would be generated by solar panels and connected to the ships batteries, if the boats batteries failed a system of battery packs would be stored in a container, ready to replace the old batteries purpose.

Weapons would originally be brought in from land including respective ammo and such, although simple weapons could be constructed on sight with the access to the proper materials and gunpowder could be made with the right materials and the know how needed.

of course with a large colony comes large waste, this waste can either be simply dumped into the sea or can be recycled to use again or for other uses.

feces feces can over a long period of time be turned into salt peter, urine can be filtered and used on crops, rubbish such as Tin cans can be recycled to use as scrap materials for anything ranging from repairing hulls to making bullets and even constructing whole boats out of recycled materials.

If due to the Zombie problem back on land becoming out of control in such a way that the world has fallen to ruins and that trying to survive on land has become an almost impossible task the best idea would be to find another cargo ship and attempt to create an even larger colony using that, the best idea would be to find a spot in the ocean and some how immobilise the ship at that point as to create a permanent colony and then do the same with the other boat and join the two boats together via a flexible bridge to allow room for swells and wind changes.

A whole community of boats could be joined together to make a seaborn city of ships, another way to accomplish this would to be to locate a sizable oil drilling platform, the boats could then be attached to the platform and more and more boats added on as needs be.