Taken from the NS 1.0 manual
The bacterium seems capable of tapping a wide variety of energy sources. Heat and water are diverse enough, but it also finds the rich sludge used for nano-construction highly desirable. Fortunately the same safe guards that prevent marines from automatically accessing these stores thwart the Kharaa too. Unfortunately, the aliens seem quite prepared for this sort of obstacle. Gorges can build resource chambers atop resource nodes, that draw the sludge up and digest it. These chambers appear to have once been a species, much like the hive. What these resource chambers could have been used for before the Kharaa encountered us is a perplexing mystery. But they convert the sludge into a usable form, just as our resource towers do.
As a result, marines and Kharaa end up fighting for the same resources. Defending these resources is vital to the Kharaa, second only to protecting their hives.
Idea 1)
Allow those safe guards to be broken at certain key points in the map. Imagine "different" sort of res node located in an auxiliary command booth inside a small hidden away vent, or an actual nano storage. Make it HARD to reach. Allow mappers to place the entity where they wish but force certain requirements on them. While this would also help with the beta 4a announcement of giving mappers more to do with maps as to relating to the gameplay, this would also add something new to NS. This would perhaps even replace the overly used double nodes used in many maps but allow a more exciting spot. It's hard to explain but lets say that for the marines to access one of these nano storages they need to weld open 2 consoles at the same time. Make the weld time high, lets say 2 minutes. If they don't do it together for over 5 seconds, the safe guards will recognize the security breach and render the nano sludge unusable. Not sure about the Kharaa, but gorges and bilebomb gives a lot to work with. You would probably say this would make entire teams simply work for this one resource node and ignoring everything else, both team would rush it and it would be a chokepoint etc etc. But these are nano storages, why should you simply get some enhanced rt which gives more res than one? When a storage is breached, one team gets the resources the storage is holding, the amount would probably be specified by the mapper. Lets say 100, on a team of 10 Kharaa this would be divided evenly. When breached the storage is rendered unusable.
Edited to just include the main idea.