My estimate of the makeup of a towed battletech artillery piece is that about a third of any given crew is involved in aiming and serving the piece itself, and the rest are ordinary infantry
...so what gives? Why would the crews suddenly be so much more massive just because there aren't wheels under the tubes?
I know nothing about artillery aside from how to supposedly take cover from it, but... according to the power of the Internet, real-world modern artillery batteries would have six to nine guns or rocket launchers - fewer if they're towed, more if they're self-propelled. And somewhere between 100-200 people.
For the sake of argument, let's take the low numbers, six guns, 100 people, that's about 17 per weapon. Probably more since the 100 is unlikely here. So the BattleTech numbers for something like a towed Sniper are
basically right... for twentieth and twenty-first century technology. But BattleTech is quite archaic in many things.
EDIT: The issue is that these real-world figures include a bunch of roles that BattleTech might not logically have, e.g. those manpower numbers include forward observers that might be embedded with infantry, advance parties to secure the artillery battery's intended location, etc... in BattleTech terms those numbers may not count towards the towed artillery weapon's crew. However other roles would remain, e.g. somebody looking at the battlefield with binoculars and rangefinders, someone, folks running the communications, commanders, then literally the people operating and reloading the things.
If we assume that forward observers and advance parties, maybe HQ/FDC people
wouldn't be counted, in BT terms, we end up with crew numbers per gun, especially for things like Long Tom, that are probably way more than even twentieth-century tech demands. However if the BT numbers DO include these people (similar to
@Valles ' notion of the figures including infantry whose job it is to guard the battery), then, yeah, sure.
It's worth noting that, I think in tabletop terms, the artillery section can fight like mechanised infantry if they are attacked close range - indeed they just use rules for mechanised infantry, merely with a big honking gun attached. But then, that doesn't say anything one way or another, since anyone in any vocation can carry a gun.
